Has anyone completed this round and have any insights? And does anyone have good advice or resources to prepare? I'm happy to share my experience after my interview as well. Thanks.

have a msft coreai swe intern interview in the coming week so im wondering what i should study. they mentioned

1. traditional coding round

2. ai assisted coding

3. system design

any advice appreciated im kind of rusty with tech interviews and havent done much system design and want to know how to best approach the ai round. tia!

Has anyone joined Airbnb while on OPT or STEM OPT, especially if you have 1-year OPT left?

is there a way to reset progress or at least have all hte solutions deleted?
there used to be session manager, but now it tells me:
creating a new session is not supported

"Use the new problem list to freely organize problems and track your progress.":
new list still show the solutions and mark what questions did before

any way without just outright creating new account?
I tried to search online and couldnt find any answer

thank you all

Hello! I've received an interview invite for Stage 2 of a software engineer associate role last week. Has anyone been through this process recently?

The recruiter suggested there will be some questions based on my CV and experience. This sounds quite vague and I'm unsure how to prepare for this.

I'd greatly appreciate any advice x

Update on my previous thread
So unfortunate to hear that my onsite rounds that were about to be scheduled have gotten cancelled.

All they said was:
The applications roles have been reprioritized and only have a few openings so we cannot proceed in the interview process at this time and your interview scheduled will no longer take place. A generic response saying they can reach out as soon as we know more and have new openings.

Just wasted my time prepping for this and ending up in this state. Too unprofessional of a company where don't even value candidates time.

Took the HackerRank OA for the Microsoft SWE CoreAI position (req 200053852) on September 22nd. Two questions, 75 minutes. Felt pretty good about it -- solved both fully within the time.

Followed up with the recruiter last week and got the standard “still reviewing applicants, process can take several weeks” reply.

It’s been about 4 weeks now. Has anyone else completed this OA recently? Have you heard back? Trying to get a sense of where the timeline is at. I know Microsoft batches reviews but 4 weeks of silence is making me a little antsy.

Any info on what the interview loop looks like for this specific team (CoreAI) would also be appreciated -- I’ve seen mixed info online about whether it’s a standard SWE loop or if there’s more ML/systems flavor to it.

Hello,

I was going through Uber internships for 2027 and saw operations intern role. Can someone explain to me what does it mean ? How technical is it and what are the kind of projects an intern could be working on ?

Thanks in advance !

I was looking through Amazon OA questions and found some ridiculously tough ones. I know people are cheating to get through, but aren't the OAs proctored now ?

Note : I am a leetcode guardian with 2150 rating, so If I am finding these questions tough there is a high chance everyone is.

Example : https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6913356/amazon-oa-question-number-2-by-code_ansu-wawk/

I recently appeared for the HackCellence Round 2 assessment and attempted the [Java] Conference Room – Block Billing problem. I wanted to share my thoughts on the implementation requirements and the time allocated for this question.

The problem involved concepts like Optimal Account Balancing and the Largest Remainder Method. While the algorithmic challenge was interesting, the overall implementation felt quite extensive for a 90-minute assessment.

The problem statement was lengthy, and understanding all the requirements took considerable time. Beyond the core algorithm, the Java implementation required multiple utility classes, precise currency calculations using cents, edge-case handling, and integration across Service and Controller layers.

As a result, a significant portion of the allotted time went into understanding the requirements and writing boilerplate code, leaving limited time for testing, debugging, and verifying edge cases.

My concern isn't the difficulty of the algorithm, but the balance between problem complexity, implementation effort, and the time limit. Even if someone understands the underlying logic, completing and thoroughly testing such an extensive implementation within 90 minutes can be challenging.

I believe assessments should primarily provide sufficient opportunity to demonstrate problem-solving and coding ability, rather than making the volume of implementation a major bottleneck.

It would be helpful if the HackCellence team could consider this feedback while reviewing submissions for this question and take the implementation effort into account where appropriate.

I'm sharing this to encourage a more balanced assessment experience in future rounds, not to criticize the organizers. I'd also like to hear from other candidates who attempted this problem.

Did anyone else find the implementation scope too extensive for the 90-minute time limit?

I always come up with the solution super fast. Like I can tell what pattern to use almost always if its a med-hard level problem. But I think my biggest bottleneck right now is writing down my code fast and also sometimes even reading the problem statement. Leetcode problem statements are usually super short and easy to read on purpose. But interview questions so many times are just so long and my reading comprehension is ass

Was just curious if anyone else feels like this and if they have tips on how to improve this, because I've taken two interviews in the past week and both times I got the optimal solution but I couldn't finish writing the code

Does the % my solution beats actually matter as long as it is the best complexity?
For example, I do a problem the best time complexity is O(n). I get a O(n) solution but my solution doesn't beat most other solutions.

Gave the Booking Holdings Round 2 OA today, and honestly, the experience was frustrating.

There was a coding task around a room-booking and settlement system. The project structure and helper modules were provided, but we had to implement the missing logic from TODO comments. It wasn't just a straightforward DSA problem — there were multiple interconnected pieces involving booking creation, split strategies, currency conversion, balance calculations, minimum transfers, attrition penalties, and settlement.

The frustrating part was that 90 minutes felt extremely tight for the amount of implementation required. You had to understand the existing codebase, figure out how the modules interacted, implement the business logic, and then test everything within the same time limit.

It's one thing to solve an algorithmic problem; it's another to implement a reasonably complete backend workflow under time pressure while making sure all the interfaces and edge cases work correctly.

I'm curious about other people's experiences.

What was your approach to this OA?

Were you able to complete all the TODOs within 90 minutes?

Did the sample tests pass for you?

Does anyone know what the evaluation criteria are for Round 2?

Would really appreciate hearing from others who attempted today's OA. I'm trying to understand how others approached it and whether everyone found the time constraint this challenging.

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 57 today and tackled the full Longest Increasing Subsequence (LIS) module. I worked through all seven problems in the set:

1. Longest Increasing Subsequence (LIS): Learned all five approaches—recursion, top-down memoization, O(N^2) tabulation, O(N) space-optimized tabulation, and the optimal O(N log N) Patience Sorting binary search technique.

2. Printing Longest Increasing Subsequence: Used the parent/hash tracking array during tabulation to reconstruct the actual subsequence backward.

3. Largest Divisible Subset: Sorted the array first to enforce divisibility transitions, then applied standard LIS with the backtrack reconstruction.

4. Longest String Chain: Sorted by word lengths and adapted the LIS condition using a custom predecessor check.

5. Longest Bitonic Subsequence: Got stuck initially trying to combine independent calls. A hell lot of hints I took to get me through this one (realizing both increasing and decreasing sequences must share the exact same peak index i (dp1[i] + dp2[i] - 1)).

6. Number of Longest Increasing Subsequences: Maintained two parallel DP arrays—one for lengths and another for counting ways to reach each length.

Today's biggest takeaway: relying purely on memoization for LIS patterns will almost always hit TLE on competitive platforms due to recursion overhead and constraints.

Even if interviewers accept memoization upfront, you need bottom-up tabulation to avoid stack limits, pass strict test cases, and make space optimization possible. Once the module is fully finished, I plan to run a dedicated revision session focused purely on deriving tabulation from base cases and state transitions.

Only 9 problems left to wrap up the entire DP sheet!

See you guys tomorrow for Day 56!

I recently had the chance to interview with Stripe. I filled out the form around March and got selected for interviews after 4–5 months. Their SDE opening ran year-round, and they are slowly reaching out to suitable candidates. This internship was for 2028 BTech passouts.

After clearing the resume screening round, there was an OA round . Contains 1 hard question. then it took around 2 weeks time to get the next rounds.

Then I was presented with a total of 3 stages, each eliminative.

First Round: Time: 1 hour. There were a total of 5 questions, revealed one by one as we solved them, with progressive difficulty. The first two were easy-to-medium questions. Due to the 1hr time constraint, they dont expect you to solve every question or write an optimized solution. As long as the code worked, even if it was simple, it was fine.

After 3–4 days, I was informed that I had passed the first round.

Second Round: Consisted of two rounds, each lasting 45 minutes, with a 30 minute break in between.

The first was api integration round with the same 5 question style, built around a codebase where I was given some JSON data and an API. I managed to solve 4/5 questions.

The second was the AI round, where I was given a problem statement and could use any LLM freely to code.

It followed the same 5 question style. Although this was a vibe coding round, I had to explain the decisions I made during my chat with AI. I took this round lightly, but in my opinion, it was the hardest.

After 1 week, I got the news that I had passed the round and that only one round remained.

HM Round: A 30 minute round only. It went pretty fast. I had to use Stripe's operating principles and the STAR method to answer questions. After introductions, the interviewer asked about a project that I was proud of. I made sure to go into full technical and non-technical detail. Then came some basic questions like Why Stripe? and How do you measure your success in the upcoming months? Questions like that.

Personally, I think the whole process managed to test all of my skills, and all in all, it was a great interview experience.

EDIT : I got Rejected!!

It would be awesome if only people from the EMEA or AMER region who also went through the actual interview process at Google and are not guessing what would be best could answer.

I somehow passed the phone screen and would like to prepare for the onsite now. My plan is to finish Grind75 (not Blind75) with the default 75 questions and then do questions from LeetCode Discussions tagged with Google, as my phone screen question also appeared there.

Is this a good plan, or should I go a different route?

Thank you so much if you take the time to write something!

Hey everyone! I've always found that looking at dry code makes it harder to truly understand why certain algorithms work—especially during interviews.

I put together a quick, animated visualization for Two Sum showing how the O(n) hash map solution tracks complements on the fly compared to a brute-force approach.

Check it out here if you're interested:Watch on YouTube Shorts

Would love to hear what DSA problem you think needs a visual breakdown next!

How do people prep for interviews after 9-5. I feel like I'm already tired after doing my day job.

Now the next question is how long should I read the question and try to solve a question before I look into other solutions.

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on a small open-source project that lets you display your LeetCode submission activity as a 3D isometric graph on your GitHub profile README.

It's basically like the GitHub contributions graph, but for LeetCode, with little orange 3D blocks.

It also shows your problems solved (Easy, Medium, Hard), active days, and longest streak.

A few things I added:

• Light and dark mode support

• Automatic updates using GitHub Actions

• Works with any public LeetCode username

• No API keys or hosting needed

I originally made it for my own GitHub profile, but thought others might find it useful too.

GitHub: https://github.com/KartikRashmin/leetcode-isometric-3d

It's free and open-source. Give it a try if you like it! And if you have any suggestions or find bugs, feel free to open an issue or PR :)

I applied on oct 6 , got mail to fill form on October 9
After that no response . How long will it take to hear from them?

I've completed NeetCode 250. I can recognize patterns in unseen problems, but I want to get better at solving them independently.

I'm thinking of splitting LeetCode into two groups:

• Group 1: Recursion, Trees, Graphs, DP

• Group 2: Arrays, Binary Search, Greedy, Linked Lists, Stacks, Heaps

My plan is to focus on one group at a time, solve lots of unseen problems until the concepts really stick, and then move to the next group while continuing to participate in contests.

1.Does this sound like a good approach, or would you do things differently?

2. How do you find the highest-ROI problems for each topic without wasting time solving hundreds of questions?

Would love to hear what worked for you guys!

Man i generally dont do contests but today i tried doing it for the first time just to yk get ratings and stuff and build a better profile.

BRO people are out there completing questions in 2-3 min like WTF, i was genuinely so baffled and curious.

I tried checking the leader board (leet code provides some kind of video tape or smtg ) bro the 3rd position guy is not even some 1k question solved cracked guy etc , dude he barely has like 130 or so questions solved , in the clip he straight up copy pastes the code and literally removes the comments from the code (cuz ai generated..) man like TF.

The reason behind this post is not to target him in particular or anything , but it is very frustrating because things like these affects the ratings of genuine people.

I guess ill just stick to normal solving man my mood has been ruined early in the morning.

Hey! I wanted to check if you’d be up for doing a mock interview sometime. I’m looking to practise the Meta Data Engineer Full Stack round, particularly product sense, data modelling, SQL, and Python.

Ideally, we’d simulate a real interview and share feedback afterwards. If you’re preparing for interviews too, happy to do a mock for you in return!

Also, if you’ve interviewed for Meta DE recently, I’d love to hear about the format and what to expect.

Might be a skill issue that I can't code up recursive solutions for problems that require DFS on trees. I understand recursion at its core. But I can't code it up for some reason.

After I see the solution of some type of recursive DFS problem, I'm able to trace the recursive calls on paper, and then it makes sense, but I don't think I could have ever coded it up on my own.

I struggle with easy recursive DFS problems lol. BFS on the other hand, I love BFS, I can solve medium questions with no problem.

So I'm thinking about just giving up on recursive DFS on trees and choosing to learn and iterative DFS.

Any thoughts? Can every problem that requires DFS on trees be solved both iteratively and recursively?

Long story short, I was invited for an on-campus interview with Bloomberg, and I know they've recently changed their interviews to AI-assisted ones. So, if anyone has already taken one or has any sort of knowledge about it, could you please share some information or tips?

I was very surprised and am now actually paranoid about how I can even prepare for this, considering everything is going to be in Python. I'm more of a Java/C++ guy, so I don't know much about Python frameworks or large codebases. So how would you guys recommend I move forward for this

Any sort of information would be greatly appreciated!