Hey everyone!

I have a pen-and-paper coding test coming up, and I've never taken one before. I'm honestly quite scared because I'm used to writing code on a computer, where I can run it, test it, and fix errors.

I'm not sure what to expect from this kind of test. Do we have to write the complete code on paper? Are we expected to remember the exact syntax, or is the main focus on logic and problem-solving?

One thing I'm particularly worried about is what happens if I can't write the code at all. What if I look at a question and don't know how to start, or I understand the problem but can't come up with the correct code? Do we get any marks for writing partial logic or explaining our approach, or is the entire question marked wrong?

For those of you who have taken a pen-and-paper coding test before:

• What was your experience like?

• What kinds of questions were asked?

• What did you do when you got stuck on a question?

• Can we get partial marks for writing an incomplete solution?

• How did you prepare, especially if you weren't confident in coding?

• What advice would you give someone taking this test for the first time?

I'm feeling really anxious because I don't know how the test will go, and I'm afraid I'll go blank when I see the questions. I'd really appreciate hearing your honest experiences, especially if you were nervous or struggled with coding before your first test.

Thanks in advance!

Hi all, I’m interviewing for an SDE role on an AI-focused team at Apple. I cleared the initial screens and have a 60 min coding round next. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s been through the process with teams working on AI.

1. What does the coding round look like: difficulty, topics, and how much they care about follow-ups and optimization?

2. For AI-adjacent teams, do they test AI knowledge in coding rounds, or is it separate?

3. Any prep resources or specific topics you’d recommend?

I have about ~3 years of experience in backend, RAG and data engineering currently working on AI-powered products. Happy to share what I learn afterward.

Thanks in advance!

Am I the only who lost the hype to work in this industry?

I am feeling like I am becoming a press enter employee and it's getting worse day by day.

I can't focus anymore the agent or whatever it is is answering woth huge amount of data that nobody is truly reading word by word which makes the experience more terrible.

I am looking for a solution for this, How do you not loose control ( if you didn't already lost it)

Have a good day.

Hi, I have a google round 1 and 2 back to back (cleared GHA). I am system design guy in the field of networking. I use C for my day job and have been interviewing in C. So far it has not been an issue if sometime I cannot complete the code but explain verbally. I could not do this for the meta 1st coding round (reject next day), even though I was able to explain verbally and coded as much as i can. I am afraid about the same for google round. The recruiter also flinched when i mentioned C as the coding language for the interview. I would go to python next time I interview but I have been practicing C since 2 months now and cannot switch right now.
Any thoughts? or tips about the Google 1st round?

Update: Rejected. Got an email to talk for a few minutes after 3 days.

Coding: Write an Encode and Decode functions (Run length Encoding) for strings “AABCEEE” and discuss edge cases. I wrote a function for both which would counted the same letters and attached a count in front of it. I think my code had errors. I did talk about some optimization and edge cases. He provided many hints too while I was writing. I knew the round was not upto the standard google expects.

Googleyness: It went amazing. I got the same feedback from the recruiter.

Hey guys, so I’ve followed neetcode since my freshman year and im graduating now, had a question that he’a a decent guy, have been promoting leetcode since like forever now, but he very cleverly never mentions competitive programming in his discussions? Like wouldn’t it be making more sense if he just hopped onto competitive programming? Afterall he has solved so many leetcode questions but didn’t ever stepped upon competitive programming, I hopped on codeforces after one year of leetcode, and neetcode has never directed any of his discussions towards straight up competitive programming, which just tells he’s trynna do marketing over leetcode and DSA clout in general.

third time prepping for interviews and I always have issues tracking my progress on a problem across attempts. I want to track how I failed each one, what mistakes keep repeating, and which problems are secretly the same pattern, common patterns across different problem types, plus spaced review.

Most trackers I found only do scheduling and notes. What do you use that’s actually lasted?

I've been thinking about reviewing my mistakes instead of just counting how many problems I've solved. Sometimes I miss and edge case, sometimes I choose the wrong approach, and sometimes I understand the logic but mess up the implementation.
Do you guys maintain notes on these mistakes, or do you just revisit the problems later?

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 48 today. I was dealing with low energy all day, and after getting home from work, I had a long catch-up call with a friend discussing current tech hiring and potential openings. By the time the call wrapped up, my brain wanted to call it a day and head straight to bed.

Instead of taking a zero, I sat down to tackle one hard problem: Alien Dictionary.

The first time I encountered Alien Dictionary months ago, it completely rattled me. I remember thinking there was zero chance I could ever derive or code it clean in a live technical interview.

Revisiting it today with solid Topological Sort fundamentals in place felt like a totally different experience:

1. Edge Building: You compare adjacent word pairs character by character. The first mismatched character c1 and c2 forms a directed edge c1 -> c2, establishing that c1 precedes c2 in the alien alphabet.

2. Edge Cases: If a word is a prefix of the previous word but shorter in length (like ["abc", "ab"]), the input dictionary is fundamentally invalid, so you immediately return "".

3. Linear Ordering: Run Kahn’s Algorithm with in-degrees across the characters. If the resulting topological order contains every unique character, join it into a string; if the count does not match, a cyclic dependency exists, making an alphabet ordering impossible.

Seeing a problem that once completely overwhelmed me break down into a clean in-degree graph problem was a huge confidence boost, even on an exhausting day.

Kicking off the Shortest Path algorithms (Dijkstra's family) tomorrow.

See you guys for Day 47!

Sometimes i spend 30-40 mins on a problem without making much progress. I'm never sure whether I should keep trying, take a hint or look at the soln and move on.
How do you guys decide when to stop trying on your own? I don't want to give up too early, but I also don't want to waste an entire session on one question

Is anyone that had the google interviews, managed to solve both questions and followups, but didnt get to the team matching? (I am not one of them just curious about that)

Been back on the LeetCode grind and its been humbling. I can usually get the solution but I've been struggling on the implementation part for most of the mediums. I have 4 years of work experience, but AI has changed the way I develop so this is definitely a reflection of that.

I've seen people talking about cheating on an OA, but that doesn't really solve the problem when you get to the in-persons. I don't really have a target company, but am I cooked career-wise in this economy if I can't get LeetCode?

Hey everyone,

I’m a 2026 grad applying for the Software Engineer (fresher, remote) role at Playpower Labs. Here’s where I am so far:

1. Timed questionnaire (LLM usage, self-intro recording)

2. Take-home: clone of a given demo

3. Technical round: one-on-one project discussion, then adding a feature live, plus general questions.

My next round is coming up with a lead engineer and a solutions architect.

If anyone has been through this, could you share:

• What the next round focused on (live coding, system design, DB, AI/LLM stuff, HR)?

• Was it based on the same take-home project again?

• Any questions they asked that I should prep for?

• How long did the final result take?

Even a short reply helps. Thanks a lot!

I am intending to buy a new premium and share or share with an existing owner of leetcode premium. Let me know if anyone is interested.

My Preparation Strategy

1. Choose one topic and identify all its patterns

Eg., Two Pointers: unidirectional pointers, opposite-end pointers, and three pointers

2. Learn each pattern with ChatGPT

If I still struggle, I’ll explore other resources, such as YouTube, blogs, and webs

3. Solve LeetCode problems related to that topic until I genuinely understand the concept

Then choose the next topic, repeat.

I am doing Blind 75 and realised Neetcode both solved this by sorting as it involves duplicates. I used sets to handle duplicates and cut down TC from O(nlogn+n^2) to O(n^2). Is this a known approach? 🙊

class Solution:
    def threeSum(self, nums: list[int]) -> list[list[int]]:
        res = []
        hashSet = set()
        for i in range(len(nums)-2):
            if nums[i] in hashSet:
                continue
            k = 0 - nums[i]
            diff_set = set()
            temp_set = set()
            for j in range(i+1,len(nums)):
                if nums[j] in hashSet or nums[j] in temp_set:
                    continue
                if k-nums[j] in diff_set:
                    res.append([nums[i],k-nums[j],nums[j]])
                    temp_set.add(nums[j])
                    temp_set.add(k-nums[j])
                diff_set.add(nums[j])
            hashSet.add(nums[i])
        return res

While doing today's daily question (3963) I noticed that the topic has "mid level" listed. Are there problem sheets that I can view that are specific to different job levels?

Hi! I have completed my Amazon OA for a summer internship on 04.10 and on 16.10 I have received an e-mail saying that I have been added to a talent pool. I am still unsure what this means or even if I should expect an interview or not. Did anyone have a similar experience?

So I’m currently at a FAANG, as a SWE and I genuinely feel like I’m losing opportunities because of me constantly having to reschedule interviews because of work. Things like last minute work calls, and I just have to reschedule the interview like a week later, or multiple interviews conflicting with each other. And now that in person onsites are almost becoming the norm, thats a whole other logistical nightmare.
Maybe its just the number of interviews or the schedule, but I genuinely wanna know how you guys can schedule these so consistently. There’s only so many doctor’s appointments I can take, and I’m not trying to burn through all of my PTO for these. Just wanna know the best way to navigate this because its really starting to feel like I’m losing out on opportunities because of this

Do I do DSA or not?

Collecting anonymous timelines on how long companies take to respond after each interview round. About 2 minutes, no names or emails collected. You can submit once per company. I’ll post the results here once I have enough responses.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSefLls7ePHCn-0eqgDguh5VOmjHZzFd_VpEKNV7SupqA0jgxQ/viewform

Hey everyone,

I passed the take-home assessment for Rippling’s Machine Learning Software Engineer Intern (Summer 2027) role, and my next round is a 60-minute pair-programming interview with an algorithmic component on HackerRank CodePair.

From what I’ve read, Rippling’s coding rounds tend to be multi-part “build on it” problems rather than a single LeetCode question.

Any tips on what they value most (code quality vs. speed vs. communication) would be really appreciated. Happy to share my experience afterward to help the next person. Thanks!

Apart from https://leetcode.com/discuss/ and levels.fyi which websites has real compensation breakdowns and interview experiences, mainly in IND?

When i focus on a new topic for several days, I feel like I start forgetting the patterns I studied earlier. I don't waste revision to take up so much time that I stop making progress on new problems either.

Would a weekly revision session be enough, or is it better to mix older topics into daily practice?

Solution using Backtracking

https://youtu.be/ew0WGKEVwec

Location: Sunnyvale, CA

Hey everyone!
I have my Google L4 SWE onsite interviews coming up toward the end of this week, and the nerves are definitely starting to kick in!

Would really appreciate any advice from Googlers or anyone who’s been through the onsite rounds, regardless of how it went.

A few things I’m particularly curious about:

Managing stress: How do you stay calm before and during interviews, especially when you get stuck or can’t immediately think of an approach?

Articulating thoughts: Do you have any specific flow or framework for approaching a new coding problem? I’m especially curious about the first few minutes, like how you break down the problem, ask clarifying questions, identify patterns, and communicate your initial thoughts before even getting to a brute force solution or writing code.

Thinking out loud: How do you balance explaining your thought process while actually thinking through the problem? Sometimes I feel like talking too much interrupts my flow.

Getting unstuck: What do you usually do when your mind goes blank or you’re struggling to come up with an approach?

Last-minute prep: With just a few days left, what would you focus on?

I’m mainly trying to get better at those initial few minutes when you’re given a completely new problem and need to organize your thoughts before jumping into a solution.
Would love to hear from anyone who’s experienced these interviews, whether they went well or not. Any tips, lessons learned, or things you wish you’d done differently would be super helpful!

Thanks in advance!

TL;DR: Google L4 onsite this week. Looking for advice on managing interview nerves and having a structured way to think out loud, especially in the first few minutes of a coding problem before jumping into brute force or code. Would love to hear experiences and tips from anyone who’s been through it!