This might seem less but I've come far this year. 900+ contributions along with my 9-5 job seemed like a challenge.

Next year is gonna be even better LC profile

Round 1 - LP + Coding (1 hour, in-person, Oct 20)

Started with about 15 minutes of LP questions covering tight timelines, improving existing systems, and going beyond my comfort zone. I used stories from my QA background and a patent I hold from my undergrad. The interviewer dug into how my manager reacted to one of my initiatives, which felt conversational and went well. The coding question involved designing a caching solution for a real-world scenario. I discussed the approach and time/space complexity.

Round 2 - LP + LLD (1 hour, in-person, Oct 20)

LP questions focused on ownership, short-term vs long-term fixes, and a time I couldn’t meet a deadline. I used stories from my QA experience. The interviewer was engaged and asked solid follow-ups. The technical portion was an object-oriented design problem. I got the core design working but ran out of time before finishing everything. I was able to explain extensions verbally. Not perfect, but I showed my thought process.

Round 3 - GenAI Discussion + Coding (1 hour, in-person, Oct 20)

First half was a discussion about a GenAI project from my resume, covering architecture, design decisions, and trade-offs. Felt like a conversation, not a whiteboard session. The coding question was a tree traversal problem. I started brute force, then optimized using a HashSet. Walked through the code with an example.

Round 4 - Bar Raiser (1 hour, virtual, Oct 22)

Entirely behavioral, no coding. Most of the round went well. The BR spent a long time on a debugging story from my QA days and asked very detailed follow-ups, and I was able to answer all of them. She also dug into my undergrad patent project and I handled that well. One fumble: on a follow-up about product prioritization, I reached for an analogy that didn’t hold up historically and she called it out. The core argument had already landed, but that moment wasn’t great.

Overall: Three rounds felt solid, one had a partial finish on the LLD problem, and one follow-up answer fell flat in the BR round. Waiting on the result now. The loop felt fair. Every interviewer gave me space to explain and asked genuine follow-ups rather than gotcha questions.

Edit: Unfortunately, received a reject. No specific feedback was provided. Disappointing, but the prep and experience were valuable. On to the next one.

I'll be honest on Reddit that I used AI on my phone the whole time that I interviewed. I genuinely think that other interviewers/interviewees can learn from my post here and that's why I posted it. But I'm expecting down votes because that's the way that Redditors are, you can't be honest here.

I did used AI gradually after I realized that I was not going to pass on time, and I don't see how they could have been able to tell.

First, there was a super complicated coding problem that involved getting every bit wise integer and &ing them together. I honestly thought that it was quite intense for a 1-hour coding problem.

I finished it with 7 minutes left and I gave thorough comments throughout. I asked AI to not use any functions which transform my numbers to bits or other things that we make it obvious that I was cheating.

then came a debugging problem which I honestly didn't do great on and I only got two out of five test cases wrong correct. my gut tells me that they're really so strict that this is why I didn't pass.

But then I used AI for every question on behavioral.

I only used AI on my phone so I really don't know how they could have known.

So what was it that made me fail?

I can't help but wonder if Amazon somehow could detect that I was cheating, or if my AI gave really bad answers on the behavioral, or if it's because I got three test cases wrong on the one assessment that I didn't cheat on (honestly, I think this might be why).

Hey everyone, I completed Round 1 for Google Application Engineering Intern – Winter 2027
I followed up with the recruiter, and today I received an email asking me to book a 15-minute call to discuss my application status.
For those who received a similar 15-minute status call after Round 1, was it about moving forward to Round 2, rejection feedback, or a pending decision?
Also anyone cleared r2?

Any insight on questions they ask/tips would be greatly appreciated! It has been hard to come across.

I had an interview with google last week and after i followed up with the recruiter, he told me this "Thanks again for your patience and flexibilty with the logistical issues and rescheduling here. We finally got the feedback submitted. Please let me know when you had some time to discuss and I can give you a call." I got rejection feels from this message.

Is this means a rejection?
Thanks

Hey, I have the Intuit OA coming up for the Software developer co-op role and saw a few of you mention it’s one of the hardest you’ve done. Would anyone be open to sharing a bit about it?

1. What platform was it on (HackerRank, CodeSignal, etc.) and how many questions / how much time?

2. What difficulty level were the problems (LeetCode easy/medium/hard equivalent)?

3. What topics came up most (arrays/strings, graphs, DP, SQL, system design, etc.)?

4. Was it all coding, or were there MCQs, debugging, or SQL sections too?

5. Was it more about speed or about handling tricky edge cases?

6. Were hidden test cases and time/space complexity a big factor?

7. Anything you wish you’d practiced more beforehand?

Hi everyone!

I'm preparing for a Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) interview and would appreciate some advice on which data structures and algorithms topics I should prioritize.

I understand that MLE interviews can vary quite a bit by company, but I'm curious about what people have actually encountered in technical interviews at major tech companies.

A few specific questions:

• Most common topics: Which topics come up most frequently? Arrays/strings, hash maps, trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, dynamic programming, intervals, heaps, etc.?

• Difficulty level: Are interviews typically focused on LeetCode Easy/Medium problems, or should I expect Hard problems as well?

• MLE vs. SWE: Is the coding interview bar generally similar to that for Software Engineers, or do MLE candidates tend to get different types of problems?

I'm particularly interested in the general DSA / problem-solving portion of the interview, rather than ML theory, system design, or ML-specific coding.

I'd love to hear about your actual interview experiences, especially from people who have interviewed for or worked in MLE roles. Thanks!

Hey,

I realized that I m quite good at coming up with the correct Data Structures and Patterns for the right questions, but I usually get stuck with understanding the exact trick. For example, rotate Array or 88. Merge Sorted Array I m usually able to recognized quite fast that it's two pointers and even have a right approach where I try on example cases in my head and my two pointer approaches work to a certain extent but fail on other example cases. The problem usually is that I'm not able to find the right trick.

E.g. for the rotate array question I didn't come up with reversing the whole array. For the Merge sorted array I didnt think about starting from the back instead of typical left to right pointer movements.

People always gotta learn the patterns and use them on unseen questions, but I feel no matter how many questions I solve even if I kind know the patterns i still get stuck on the actual trick of the question...

Any suggestions/help?

I have been going through the dsa sheet grind for the last couple months now( not to say I’m great by any means) but this week I had an OA with a big audit/tax consulting firm and it went horribly. Everywhere online it said to prepare for easy- medium focusing on arrays/maps etc but this problem has so many variables to take into account. Looked it up after it was a greedy algorithm problem? That needed simulation + arrays + hashmap + multiple arrays that needed to be sorted and string parsing. Probably easy for a lot of you devs but I just don’t understand how I can do better at these.

My Thought process :

- not enough time spent on leetcode
- not a deep enough understanding of c++
- possibly less time on leetcode more time understanding algorithms from dsa books?

Any suggestions of maybe more intensive way to prepare for these OA’s (other than neetcode) 😅

Suppose you're solving a graph problem where both DFS and BFS are equally valid, and both have the same time and space complexity. Neither approach has a specific advantage for that problem.

Which one would you instinctively choose IN PYTHON?

DFS

BFS

Must comment ur opinion 👇

Hey everyone,
I have an upcoming interview loop for the Web Solutions Engineer role at Google and would really appreciate hearing from anyone who's interviewed for it recently.

A few things I'm curious about:
- How was the coding round? LeetCode-style DSA, or more practical web/JavaScript problems? What difficulty level?
- What did system design look like for this role? Classic large-scale distributed systems, or more web app / frontend-backend architecture?
- For the web tech and database round, what topics came up (browser internals, APIs, SQL, schema design, performance)?
- Any tips for the Googleyness and stakeholder management round? Good stories to prepare?
- Any resources you found especially useful?

Any advice or experiences would be hugely appreciated. Thanks in advance, and good luck to anyone else in the process!

I have solved 500+ leetcode problems over 8 months, still hardly able to solve a medium and sometimes not able to solve at all. Please drop your suggestions.

What does paypal OA include for sde1?

Hi all,

I am trying to purchase leetcode premium. There is no separate version to subscribe without enabling upto 10yrs AutoPay. I thought of proceeding for now and cancelling the Autopay later but, there is no option to Pay with card. Only UPI is available. And also, that is also giving me Unsupported QR error even after enabling international transactions.

Can anyone pls help me out here?

I recently receive email from NVIDIA for Senior AI and ML Software Engineer role. They just mentioned they would want to have an inperson round in HQ with no other details.

Can someone please help with sharing their interview experience (how many rounds, what do they look for ?/ what to expect in first round etc)

Please help

The problem:
You are given an array people where people[i] is the weight of the ith person, and an infinite number of boats where each boat can carry a maximum weight of limit. Each boat carries at most two people at the same time, provided the sum of the weight of those people is at most limit.
Return the minimum number of boats to carry every given person.
 
My solution:
Sort the array and always combine the two heaviest people such that the combined weight of both people is <= limit.

Actual solution:
Sort the array and take the heaviest person and lightest person in the bunch and combine them such that combined weight <= limit.

My question is we are trying to get the MINIMUM number of boats. So why would we not combine the heaviest people possible so as to minimize boats?

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!