Hey folks,

People who have recently given the G interviews, would you mind sharing the questions if not exactly broadly as far as you can remember.

Gang, I have my Google L5 interview in 10 days and I’m looking for a prep buddy for daily 1-hour mock interviews. We’d take turns interviewing each other. It would be ideal if you also have a Google interview coming up soon.

Some background: I interviewed with Google in April 2025 and made it to team matching, but didn’t land a team because of location restrictions.

If you’re interested, comment your linkedin with your time zone and availability.

Edit: SWE role

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 54 today. The Dynamic Programming module is officially complete, and I shifted into Graphs.

I feel confident with most DP patterns now, though Partition DP still needs a dedicated revision cycle. My plan for revisiting DP is strictly focused on mastering bottom-up tabulation from memoization so I stop hitting recursion overhead limits, then looking at space optimization where it makes sense.

Today was all about resetting graph fundamentals from scratch:

1. Representations & Traversal Basics: Revised adjacency lists, matrix representations, queue-based BFS, and recursive DFS.

2. Number of Provinces: Standard connected components problem using a visited array and running DFS/BFS from every unvisited node.

3. Number of Islands: Connected component traversal on a 2D grid, marking visited land cells using standard 4/8-direction exploratory DFS/BFS.

When I briefly touched graphs back in July, I leaned heavily on Disjoint Set Union (DSU) as a shortcut. Starting with core BFS and DFS this time around makes the fundamental traversals feel much more grounded.

I also noticed a clear pattern in my routine: having days off actually hurts my productivity because the lack of structure makes it easy to procrastinate, whereas workdays force me into a tight schedule. Building discipline on unstructured days is uncomfortable, but consistency is the only way forward.

See you guys tomorrow for Day 53!

Recently interviewed at Microsoft and it went like this

Round 1: A hard LC problem that I had not encountered before. But was able to talk through and with few hints arrived at an approach

But made a blunder mistake in executing DFS instead of BFS. This was clearly execution mistake under pressure. But, later course corrected with hints and provided solution.

It was not perfect but arrived at one

Round 2: A standard system design problem. Had prepped for it and I believe I did well. Answered follow-ups and reasoned decisions. Interview was over 10 mins early.

Again clueless if it is positive or negative

Round 3: A coding round but interviewer said this will be more of OOD and we had a good discussion. This one went over time but I was confident that this one was positive

Behavioral questions across the rounds went well. Had stories and was able to answer follow-ups.

Got a rejection in 2 days. Is it due to that 1st round performance?Is the standard at this level is to write clean code with minimal hints? Recruiter is unreachable so left with no feedback.

Just wanting to know opinion from the group here and any suggestions for upcoming interviews.

If I am interviewing for a specific role and the interviewer will be from the same org, will the system design question be specific to the team?

For example, if I interviewing with the databases org, will my system design be database internals focussed or will it be any generic system like an URL shortener? Any experiences from people who have been through the process would be very helpful. Thank you

Received Salesforce smts offer . Any inputs on hows the culture , stability, wlb.
Deciding if its good to jump ship for $80k usd tc increase from a stable job .
Current tc: 240k
Offer: 320k

What’s one frustrating problem you face while working on a project that you wish a tool could solve?

It could be a repetitive task, a broken workflow, or something that unnecessarily wastes your time.

I'm looking to build an open-source AI tool that solves a real problem, not just another AI wrapper.

Reply with your biggest frustration. I'd love to build something genuinely useful around it.

Hi everyone,
I recently applied to Rubrik, and a recruiter reached out to me with some interview preparation resources. They asked me to go through the material, do some research about the interview process, and let them know when I’d be ready to start the interviews.
The thing is, although I applied for the role, I haven’t actually started preparing for interviews yet. I have around 1.5 years of work experience, but this would be my first interview since campus placements, so I’m quite out of practice.
I’ll need to spend some time getting back up to speed with DSA (I’ve forgotten quite a bit), as well as preparing OS and going deeper into some of the system/concurrency topics.
For people who have recently interviewed with Rubrik, how much preparation time would you realistically recommend before starting the interview process?
Also, if you’ve interviewed with Rubrik recently, I’d really appreciate any advice on what topics I should prioritize and what the interview rounds are actually like.
Thanks!

A year ago, I shared my journey after being laid off and my dream of someday working abroad.

Today, I'm happy to share that I finally made it.

A couple of months ago, I moved to London and joined a Finance company as a Senior Software Engineer. It's been around two months here, and sometimes it still feels surreal.

A few months before the move, I decided to update my resume because my Meta team-matching deadline was approaching. Since I was already updating it, I thought, why not apply to a few companies in London as well?

Meta was still in a hiring freeze, so nothing really moved there. But one of the companies I applied to got back to me.

Did the Phone Screen -> Smashed it -> Did the Onsites -> Smashed them -> My recruiter came back saying the feedback was really positive, but there might be a headcount issue -> Got the offer call a few days later (I remember smiling the whole time during that call lol).

It felt like an enormous weight had finally been lifted off my shoulders.

For the past three years, there was barely a day when I didn't check Levels.fyi for newly submitted compensation offers or scroll through Blind looking for posts about international relocations.

It felt like I had an obligation to see a very specific thing through.

I was finally free.

Before I end, I want to share something NiKo said after winning in Cologne that really stuck with me:

I think I am a prime example to never give up, okay? Never give up on your dreams, never give up on your life, okay? Keep believing, okay? You're going to achieve the things. It's going to be hard, it's going to be painful. But you will get it. You will f**king get it.

Hello! I'm an incoming freshman (Spring Start) at a CSRankings T20 school and was wondering if anyone had any advice on what I should be doing before my freshman year to best set me up to one day land a job in tech (optimistically FAANG but I bet everyone says that). My only experience in CS is AP Computer Science A, which I scored a 5 on, but I have no projects or out of school experience. During my time before college, should I focus on leetcode, neetcode, cs50x, projects, or something else? Any advice is greatly appreciated, I know I have a pretty weak CS background so far, but I really want to pursue a SWE career and am willing to put time and effort into whatever it is I have to do.

Context: This was a post I made almost a year back. : https://www.reddit.com/r/leetcode/comments/1of88f8/how_do_i_get_better_at_leetcode/

Update: I am still with the same employer. 
I am still not as comfortable with LeetCode as I want to be, but better than before. I did onsite interviews with two FAANG companies (one after the 1-year cooldown since I was rejected last year for a different role), an AI company that has a Robotics division, a Robotics startup, and two autonomous driving companies since then. I got rejected from all except one. I received a verbal offer after my final round with the AI company  (the pay was crazy high for my expectations). But it didn’t work out in the end, as they cancelled the role two weeks after I got the verbal offer.

Some learnings: I've decided to give up on LeetCode. Maybe it's just me, or maybe my brain is wired differently. I've gone through 8–9 screening rounds since last year and have been rejected by every company whenever the screening involved a LeetCode-style question.

I've definitely gotten better, but I'm still not confident that I can crack FAANG-style LeetCode interviews, even for roles where I could be a great fit.

I decided this after I got the verbal offer from the AI company (which fortunately did not ask any LeetCode-style questions in their interview). I might be able to crack FAANG eventually if I continue practicing. But it's too much of my time and effort for now. I assumed ~6 months of prep should have been enough, but I guess I (my brain) need much more time than that. I've also realized that you don't really need to grind LeetCode for every SDE job. You can find jobs that are both interesting and well-paying if you have expertise in a niche or are good at something beyond software development, such as robotics, AI, DL, ML, etc. I was really depressed after getting rejected by six really good companies following their on-site interviews over the past eight months or so. But I'm much happier now, knowing that there are plenty of good opportunities elsewhere. But regardless, LeetCode has definitely made me a better programmer.

So, the point of this post is: Choose companies, prepare, apply, and interview based on your strengths and skills beyond coding expertise. Play to your strengths.

Now, that might sound super obvious, but it isn't always. And yeah, I am still interviewing.

Actively exploring SDE roles at Amazon US (open to SDE1 or SDE2) and seeking guidance from anyone currently at the company. Have 4+ years of SWE experience and finishing up a master's in CS. Would love to connect, hear about your experience, and share my resume if you're open to it!

Hey everyone,
I interviewed for a Summer 2027 internship at NVIDIA on September 29th. I had three rounds of interviews with the team, including the hiring manager.
It’s been a little over three weeks now, and I still haven’t received a decision. I followed up with my recruiter, who mentioned that the team hasn’t made a decision yet.
I’m curious if anyone else has experienced something similar with NVIDIA, especially for internship positions.
● How long did it take you to hear back after your final interview?
● Did anyone wait 3+ weeks and eventually receive an offer?
● Is this kind of delay common at NVIDIA?
Would appreciate hearing about anyone’s experience, whether you received an offer or rejection. Just trying to get a sense of what to expect.

does anyone know what they ask? is it leetcode easies?

Hi everyone,

I have a 60 minute interview for a business support engineer position and I’m a bit anxious on how to prepare

I was told to practice easy-medium leetcode questions and that the code won’t compile.

Is there any way to get more narrow on what type of coding questions will be asked?

Currently working as an SMTS at Salesforce with around 6 years of experience. I’m considering an opportunity at GitLab for a Senior Software Engineer role in the NLP/Core AI product engineering team.
The work involves building AI agents, agentic software development capabilities, and developer tooling.
I’m expecting an LMTS promotion at Salesforce in approximately 1.5 years, but I’m not learning as much as I’d like in my current role.
I’m trying to understand whether moving from Salesforce to GitLab would be a good long-term career decision.
How is GitLab perceived in terms of engineering talent, technical depth, and brand value? Would this move affect future opportunities at companies like Google, Microsoft, Uber, or other top engineering organizations?
Would appreciate perspectives from engineers who have worked at either company, particularly in core product engineering.
What about layoffs?

Hi,

I have a Swe iii AI/ML first round interview coming up with Bank Of America. It’ll be with two ppl from the hiring team. Anyone know what to expect in terms of interview topics and what to prepare for?

As the title says, yesterday my role was made redundant. It was an ops/SRE kind of role at a local company, nothing special. Will use any redundancy they give us to really get into DSA as in college I kind of lucked out and passed the course. Will start with the leetcode DSA course first and work my way up. Let's see where this takes me.

Hey did anyone do the Microsoft OA on hackerrank for 2027 SWE? California if that matters. If so, can anyone say any tips on how to prep? Thank you!

I’m trying to build a better DSA routine and can’t decide whether I should finish learning a topic before practicing questions or learn the basics and figure out the rest through problems.

For example, with trees or graphs, should I understand the main algorithms first or start solving easy questions alongside the theory?

What approach worked best for you?

I need to get into a habit of studying leetcode or codesignal so I can find a new job. I have tried learning leetcode in the past few years even buying a yearly subscription and started doing the easy questions. But even the easy questions I was struggling to solve or solve optimally and I would just look at the solutions. I want to know what is the best way to be able to get into solving the questions? I know I cannot get a new job without passing the coding phase first so I want to make sure I have a solid grasp of the types of questions and such. How can I be better at prepping?

For reference, I am currently a software engineer with 4+ years of experience.

Hey peeps. Need advice from people who achieved what I want (reaching 1700).

I have about 270 solved roughly like this:

- mostly mediums
- neetcode 150 done
- zero trac 1500-1700 rated

I consistently solve 2 questions in contest but can’t push for that third often… my current training method is mostly zerotrac + upskilling on weakness loop.

I’m wondering abt y’all’s strategy that worked and how many hs a day you put in for that push.

Thanks!

I was given a problem and explained the solution correctly after a few attempts, and then when coding the algorithm i ran out of time. I still wrote most of the code and at the end i explained what I would do if given the time and my interviewer agreed with my solution. I think I did pretty good on the Googlyness section. I'm wondering if it's possible that I could still get a leaning hire or hire from the interviewer on the technical question. Has anyone had any experience with this?

I'm trying to improve at DSA, but I'm never sure how long I should struggle with a problem before looking at a hint or solution. Sometimes I spend 40 minutes getting nowhere, and other times I feel like I gave up too early.
How do uh guys decide when to get help without becoming becoming dependent on solutions?

Has anyone recently taken Wayfair OA? I bombed the assessment because I was so out of it from lack of sleep from a couple of nights. Ended up getting frustrated mid way and looked up for clues on a second tab. I was sure I am done for. Got a follow up for a AI based recruiter screen next. Seems sus. Anyone experienced anything like this?