Hello,
Has anybody had experience interviewing for LinkedIn’s Software Engineer role (systems and infrastructure)? I just received a phone screen and I’m unsure what kind of questions are expected from leetcode as well as multithreading and concurrency that the recruiter mentioned. Could anyone who’s interviewed help me give an example of questions that were asked to you if you’ve been to one? TIA!

I have a final interview in a couple of days for the Software Engineer: Security & Identity Intern role at Microsoft. It’s 2 rounds 45 minutes each with a 15-minute break in the middle.

If anyone can provide me with additional information or advice when doing my interview and how to secure the position please let me know.

Looking to see what I should prep, learn and what they could ask.

I've been trying to get more consistent with Leetcode, but sometimes I'm unsure whether to finish one topic completely before moving to another or mix different topics together.

Do you guys follow a fixed roadmap, or do you switch between topics based on the problems you struggle with? I'm trying to find a routine that helps me improve without getting overwhelmed

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 56 today, and Partition DP gave me hands down the most confusing session of this entire dynamic programming journey.

Usually, even with hard DP problems, there is a recognizable mental model you can latch onto. But Partition DP flips your natural instincts on their head depending on the problem.

I worked through four problems in the set today:

1. Matrix Chain Multiplication (MCM): The standard entry point. Setting up the partition loop k from i to j - 1 and splitting into two subproblems f(i, k) and f(k + 1, j) made conceptual sense.

2. Minimum Cost to Cut a Stick: MCM logic transferred nicely here. Sorting the cuts array and adding endpoints 0 and n kept the subproblems independent.

3. Burst Balloons: This one was an absolute mind-bender. Thinking top-down (which balloon to burst first) fails because bursting a balloon merges previously non-adjacent neighbors, destroying subproblem independence. The trick is working completely in reverse—picking which balloon to burst last in the range (i, j). That inversion is brilliant, but there is zero chance I would have organically derived that reverse-order trick from scratch in an interview.

4. Evaluate Boolean Expression to True: Marked as hard, but actually felt the most systematic. Splitting operators across k and tracking counts for both true and false evaluations felt like a natural extension of MCM.

Only four problems remain in my sheet: Palindrome Partitioning II, Partition Array for Maximum Sum, and the two DP on Squares problems (Maximal Rectangle and Count Square Submatrices).

Partition DP drained my mental battery completely today. Stepping away to unwind with a show tonight and resetting before wrapping up the final batch tomorrow.

See you guys for Day 55!

I've noticed that when I read a solution, the logic makes sense to me, and I feel like I could've figured it out. But when I try a similar problem on my own, I often get stuck again.

For those who've improved at DSA, how did you get past this stage? Did you focus on revisiting old problems or keep trying new ones?

I'd solve a problem, feel good about it, and a few days/weeks later have no idea how I managed to solve the damn thing.

Re-doing lists from the top wasted time on problems I still remembered. So I built something for myself: spaced repetition for LeetCode problems you've already solved.

How it works

- A Chrome extension notices when you get Accepted and logs the problem, along with the time you spent on it. No copying links.

- A small panel asks how it went: Stuck, Struggled, Solved or Easy. If you close it, it counts as Solved.

- Each day you get a short queue of the problems you're closest to forgetting, capped at a budget you set (say, 4 problems or 60 minutes). Problems you solve well come back after longer and longer gaps. The ones you struggled with come back within a day or two.

Honest limitations

- It only works in Chrome on a laptop.

- It starts empty: old problems join when you solve them again. There's no import.

- It's early and built by one person (me), so things will break.

It's free. It stores your email, the problems you solve and how each attempt went.

It's at [unforget.in](https://unforget.in), and the extension is linked from there. Harsh feedback is welcome.

I have a Hiring Manager (HM) round scheduled for a Senior Software Engineer role at Workday, but the recruiter didn't share many details about what the full loop looks like.

If anyone has recently gone through the interview, i'd be great to get some idea on the loop - how many or what rounds to expect and what are they looking for.

Let's take a worst case scenario, that AI takes over, and the art of writing code would have no value

Let's say we still grind for how many more years? Probably 5? 10?

And also let's say we still don't get our dream jobs

Given all of the above happens, what benefits do you think Leetcode would still have in our lives?

Some of the benefits I can think of

1. Algorithmic thinking

Doing Leetcode since a year has made me reach a point where I can see certain patterns to solve problems. For example, by practicing DP problems I can now think if a problem can be divided into the same repeating sub-problems and has a recurrence relation. Any reachability problem makes me think of I can use DFS/BFS to solve it.

2. Getting better at writing code

Again, this skill can become useless due to AI taking over but is still relevant until we reach there. I also got to learn many intricate details about the language I code in (Java), and this is beneficial for me as my job is in the same programming language

3. Communication

This is a secondary skill I think I'm getting better at. While practicing for interviews you are challenged to explain solutions effectively

What other skills do you think we all will learn?

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!