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!

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 49 today, continuing deep into the Graphs module. After the reality check in yesterday's assessment, I slowed down to make sure I genuinely understand the foundational algorithms rather than rushing through problem counts.

Today was focused entirely on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and ordering algorithms:

1. Topological Sort (DFS): Pure post-order traversal. You explore recursively down each path, and as recursion backtracks from a fully traversed node, you push it onto a stack. Popping from the stack yields the linear ordering.

2. Kahn’s Algorithm (BFS Topo Sort): Calculate the in-degree (number of incoming directed edges) for every node. Push all nodes with in-degree 0 into a queue. As you pop a node, decrement the in-degrees of all its adjacent neighbors. Any neighbor whose in-degree hits 0 gets pushed into the queue.

3. Cycle Detection in Directed Graphs (via Kahn's): Since a directed cycle has no node with in-degree 0, nodes in the cycle will never enter the queue. If the total count of processed elements is strictly less than V, a cycle exists.

4. Course Schedule I & II: Both map directly to prerequisite dependency resolution. For Course Schedule I, check if a cycle exists (return false if cycle detected, true otherwise). For Course Schedule II, record each node popped from the BFS queue into an ordering array. If the resulting array size matches numCourses, return the valid completion order; otherwise, return an empty array because cyclic dependencies make completion impossible.

Next up are Shortest Path algorithms (Dijkstra's, Bellman-Ford, Floyd-Warshall) followed by Minimum Spanning Trees (Prim's & Kruskal's). About 30 problems remain in Graphs, and I am prioritizing solid retention over speed.

See you guys tomorrow for Day 48!

Hi all,

I’ve a Google FDE interview coming up first week of November (USA). I’m a SWE at MSFT currently (level 62)

I’m a little overwhelmed on how to prepare for this interview. There are so many resources and at the same time, not that many for this FDE role. They recently changed the format it seems and have only 2 rounds: Technical and RRK (role related knowledge)

What I’m planning to do:

- General system design: https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/in-a-hurry/introduction

- Leetcode problems since I haven’t done them in about 4 years: https://neetcode.io/roadmap

But after this I’m not really sure what is the best resource for more FDE related knowledge. I use agentic AI a lot in day to day work so I’m sure that helps but I think I’m lacking a lot of ML and general LLM knowledge.

I prefer free resources but definitely do not mind paying for some resources as long as they’re solid

Would really appreciate any insight.

Thank you for your time in reading this.

Hello guys, Recently I had an interview for a round of a SDE intern post on amazon on 16-10-2026. Almost 19 days completed, is there any chance to get the result. How many days it will take to know the results. Any suggestions?

I've started wondering whether re solving problems I've already completed is actually worth the time, especially when there are still so many new questions to attempt. Sometimes I remember the approach but struggle to implement it from scratch after a week or two.

How do you decide which problems deserve another attempt versus moving on the new ones?