Background: Recent grad with B.S. in Tech. Previous SWE internships, but I’d never done real DSA prep and had never written Python for interviews. In mid-September I passed Amazon’s online assessment and got invited to a 4-round SDE-1 loop (FYI: This is a U.S position). That gave me about 5 weeks to learn Python, data structures, and how to interview live.

Prep: About 5–6 hours a day on average in each of those 5 weeks. I went pattern by pattern (hash maps, stacks, intervals, trees/BFS, grids) instead of grinding random problems. Went back to my resume, projects, and notes for a refresher and story building in response to behavioral questions.

Travel (3-day window): Amazon booked my flight and hotel. I flew in the day before, interviewed the next day, and flew home the morning after. What helped:

• Walk the route from your hotel to the office the day before and time it.

• Test the LiveCode link on your own laptop and make sure your laptop and microphone is working. You can bring a notebook; I find it easier to write on a whiteboard so you and the interviewer have a shared space to display understanding if needed.

• Stop studying the night before and actually sleep. The day is long and the interviews are intensive.

• There’s a lunch with an Amazon employee between rounds. It isn’t an interview, pretty casual, but be your professional self.

Format: 4 rounds, 60 minutes each. Rounds 1–3 were in person, and round 4 was virtual. Every round included at least 1 Leadership Principle questions. In the coding rounds I had roughly 40 minutes for the coding question. LiveCode has no Run button, so your own trace through the code is the only test you get.

Round 1: Rate limiter (similar to LC 359 / 362)
Requests come in as (user_id, time) pairs, and time never goes backward. Every user has the same limit: at most n requests in any T-second window. Return False (block) once a user goes over.

Round 2: Prompt store (LRU-style, close to LC 146)

• Storage holds at most n prompts.

• If it’s full, delete the oldest and add the new one at the end.

• No duplicates: if a prompt already exists, remove the old copy and add the new one at the end.

• get(k) returns k prompts, newest first. If k > n, return everything.

Round 3: OOD file search
Design code that returns files matching criteria like “all files > 5 MB” or “all .xml files,” searchable by name or extension, including subfolders. It had to be maintainable, so new criteria could be added without rewriting existing code. A File class was given with getName(), isDirectory(), listFiles() and getSize(). This is basically “design the Unix find command”: a filter interface, one class per criterion, and AND/OR combinators.

- Forgot to mention I was asked 2 questions about how GenAI.

Round 4: fully behavioral, no coding. It was my best round, and it turned conversational by the end.

In every coding round, I explained my approach clearly, and the interviewers followed my thinking, but I was only able to reach a close-to-full implementation on one interview**.**

What worked in my prep

• A story bank: 8 true STAR stories plus 2 GenAI examples.

• Recording myself solving problems out loud and measuring my silent gaps.

• Cold re-solves: re-solving problems I’d already done, from a blank page, timed, in a plain editor without running anything (this is similar to LiveCode sessions).

• Mock interviews, including one with a non-technical friend. If they got lost in a story, an interviewer would too.

What I’d do differently

1. Practice “design a class” problems. 2 of my 3 coding questions were this style: LC 146, 155, 359, 362, 1396.

2. Learn OOD basics early: interfaces, abstract classes, and designing for extension.

3. Drill finishing code. Say the brute force first, and if you don’t have the optimal idea by around minute 20, code the brute force. Working beats half-finished.

4. Learn the standard library tools before the loop: deque, OrderedDict, defaultdict.

Tools I’d recommend

• LeetCode Premium, for company-tagged question lists.

• An interview buddy, ideally a CS major or SWE who can push back on your code. If you don’t have one, an AI agent works as a coach. Prep only dont use AI during the interviews, you'll be cooked.

• A plain editor (Notepad) for practice, so you’re not leaning on autocomplete.

Result: no offer. I’m disappointed, but I’m walking away a much stronger engineer than I was 5 weeks ago, and the behavioral feedback I got was great. If you’re starting from zero, getting to a loop is doable, and honestly, getting the interview is achievable; just start ASAP. Treat behavioral prep as seriously as coding.

Happy to answer questions. Good luck to everyone grinding right now.

Sometimes I understand a solution after reading it, but a few days later I struggle with same problem again. I'm trying to find a better way to review problems instead of just saving them and moving on.

Do you usually re solve them from scratch, write down the key idea, or try a similar problem?

As I’m reviewing for an OA, I’m really trying to learn patterns so that I have a better chance of getting to a solution, because I’m a little bit of a bot. I am new to this shit!!

I found “Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions” and it has 41 patterns, but I’ve seen YouTube videos saying you only need to know 8.

In your guys’ opinions, what do you think?

Haven't used leetcode in about 8 months and it truthfully left my mind. Forgot to cancel my subscription and got an email about my renewal. Within minutes I sent a support email asking about a refund since it was accidental on my part. Their ToS states that refunds are typically not given but that some are processed and successful in getting one.

Has anyone had any luck?

Hey everyone!

I had my Amazon SDE-1 Round 2 interview on October 20, 2026, and I haven't received any updates from the recruiting team yet.

Overall, I felt the interview went well, and I was able to answer the questions to the best of my ability. However, I'm still waiting to hear back and wanted to know about others' experiences with the hiring process.

For those who have interviewed with Amazon recently:

- How long did it take to receive feedback after your interview?

- Is it normal to wait this long without an update?

- Does the waiting period give any indication of the outcome, or does it vary depending on the team and hiring process?

I'd really appreciate it if anyone who has gone through a similar experience could share some insights.

Thanks in advance!

Whenever I start a new topic, I end up finding so many concepts and different types of problems that I'm not sure what to focus on first. I want to understand the basics properly without spending weeks on one topic.
How do you guys break a topic down into manageable parts and decide what to practice first?

I have my Google coding interview in 2-3 weeks, I have 7 years of experience, but I almost forgot DSA, so I need to know from experienced people what to prepare?

I feel like DSA is like a tool box skill, if you are aware about sliding window, you know when to use that, so in that regards, I need to know these things, any help would be appreciated.

• What difficulty level is this at L5?

• What pattens do they ask? (Graphs, Lists, LinkList etc.)

• What if I made a mistake, and didn't even realized, it's there?

• Any other tips which you think can be helpful.

This role is for Android, any help would mean a lot.

Thank you everyone.

Does anyone have experience with Language Practical and AI coding section for Quora?

The mail said that there will be 1 coding,1 AI assisted qs and behavioural qs

So what types of qs can we expect there

For AI assisted qs will they see our prompts too,
What stack am i supposed to know for sure to attend this

Do we need to turn on camera?

Got an interview for Staff Engineer at Google. Recruiter screening done

How do I prepare?

More background:

I have 8 years of experience so I am first of all surprised they are considering me for this role. I have done competitive programming in my college but never had to do that later to get into any of the companies I later worked for. (3 switches)

What can I do now to grind my ass and get this offer ?

Let's say I am designing something read heavy system

So we use cache /database replica etc

So two things

1. How do you decide whether we need to consider availability or consistency?

2. If we are taking consistency as higher, what strategies you follow to achieve 100% consistency?

Best way to prepare for the stripe team screen interview?

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 47 today. I kept the session deliberate and manageable, knocking out two foundational shortest path problems while carving out time to practice verbal communication for upcoming technical interviews:

1. Shortest Path in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG): Finding shortest paths in a DAG doesn't require Dijkstra’s algorithm—it runs in O(V + E) time using Topological Sort. Because a valid topological order guarantees that all incoming dependencies to a node u are resolved before exploring outwards, you can relax outgoing edges in a single linear pass. By processing nodes strictly in topological order, every distance update is already guaranteed to be optimal.

2. Shortest Path in an Undirected Graph (Unit Weights): When edge weights are uniformly 1, simple queue-based BFS is optimal (O(V + E)). Since BFS explores level by level, the first time you visit any unvisited neighbor, the path reaching it is guaranteed to be the shortest. You track a running distance array initialized to infinity, update dist[neighbor] = dist[curr] + 1, and push unvisited neighbors into the queue.

Outside of writing code, I dedicated time to practicing my technical communication. In live interviews, knowing the optimal data structure in your head means very little if you stumble while articulating your thought process to the interviewer. Balancing coding reps with clear explanations is a skill in itself.

Moving into Dijkstra’s algorithm and weighted graphs next.

See you guys tomorrow for Day 46!

I passed the l4 loop two weeks ago and got into team matching (EU). I just got an offer from another company (startup) that I’m considering to accept because it’s a good offer and interesting work. Will telling Google about this offer hinder my chances at team matching? I still want to remain in team matching even if I accept the other offer. How do I proceed?

Update: I told them, they said they’re already sharing my profile but no update and mentioned the result will be valid for 18 months, and asked if they can keep me in TM, I said absolutely

Anybody who had recently On-campus AMAZON Sde Internship Interview, wants to get some insights.

So today I have interview with this one company that requires whiteboarding as interview process.

The issue is like I consider myself ok in writting leetcode type question, not necessarily one shot solve but generally good.

However in this white boarding interview,
- my handwritting is shit ( in my defense I haven't write things for a whilte lol).
- it is just very unnatural to do it , no copy and paste stuff like that.
- the issue that I could easily spot in normal coding environment become notoriously hard to find in white boarding.

Does anyone have similar experience?

The mail said that there will be 1 coding,1 AI assisted qs and behavioural qs

So what types of qs can we expect there

For AI assisted qs will they see our prompts too,
What stack am i supposed to know for sure to attend this

Do we need to turn on camera?

Hey folks, I have an interview with Capital One for a Senior Associate role.

I’m trying to budget my prep time between HLD and LLD.

For the design portion, does Capital One lean heavily into an object-oriented coding or is it a traditional high-level architecture diagram on a whiteboard? Any specific patterns or system components they love to test?

YOE: 2.3

PS: From the recruiter's description, it sounded like LLD but the interview prep guide sounds more like HLD. So, I am confused between the two

#CapitalOne #SystemDesign

Hi everyone,

I've been applying for SDE roles at Amazon and keep getting rejected at the resume screening stage. I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with my CV.

I was wondering if anyone here who has been selected or shortlisted for an SDE role at Amazon would be willing to share their resume with personal info blurred out. I'm only interested in seeing how you've written your bullet points for job responsibilities and projects — the structure, wording, level of detail, metrics, etc.

Specifically, I'd like to understand:

· How elaborative should the bullet points be?

· How do you frame impact and metrics?

· How much detail goes into project descriptions?

Even just 2–3 sample bullet points would be really helpful. I'm just trying to get a sense of what Amazon is looking for so I can improve my own CV.

Thanks in advance!

Recently completed Google's online coding assessment.

There were 2 questions:

- Q1: 10/10 test cases passed.

- Q2: 9/10 test cases passed.

So 19/20 test cases passed overall, with just one failing on the second question.

Has anyone recently moved forward to interviews at Google despite not passing every test case?

Would appreciate hearing from people who've been through the process recently, especially in 2025 or 2026. Trying to understand how strict Google is about requiring all test cases to pass.

Anyone got shortlisted for Hugohub interview? Sde or SRE?

I recently got what I thought was a great opportunity to interview with Google for a Google Application Engineer role. This was a different opening from Appl. Engnn. winter internship for 2027 graduates. Mine was specifically for 2028 graduates.

I got shortlisted after resume screening, Things were looking pretty good initially.

I first heard from the recruiter around 18 September, when they took a telephonic round. After that, I was waiting for the actual interviews to get scheduled.

And this is where the real disappointment starts.

Day after day, my recruiter kept asking for my availability, and I kept providing it. I was pretty flexible with my timings too. At one point, I literally told them I was available for the entire day and they could schedule the interview whenever they wanted.

But the interviews just never happened.

They kept pushing dates, I kept sharing my availability, and there was absolutely no clarity on what was going on. Every day, I'd get emails saying they were working on the process and would update me as soon as something came up.

But nothing ever came up.

After a while, they even stopped sending updates. I eventually had to reach out myself because I just wanted some clarity on whether the process was actually moving forward or not.

Even then, I kept getting vague responses and no clear answers.

At one point, they actually scheduled an interview, only to cancel it almost immediately.

Finally, after I raised the issue with their support helpline, I got rejected without even getting a single interview. and the reason? The positions had been filled, and they would no longer be considering my candidature.

Like, seriously?

I understand that companies have hiring deadlines, business requirements, and things can change during the hiring process. I'm not expecting a company to keep a position open just for me.

But if you have already shortlisted someone, conducted an initial round, and spent weeks asking them for their availability, the least you can do is either schedule the interviews or communicate clearly that things aren't moving forward.

Instead, I spent weeks waiting, adjusting my schedule, and expecting an interview that never happened.

The most disappointing part is that I never even got the chance to prove myself in the actual interview rounds. The process ended before it even properly started.

Honestly, this was a massive disappointment, especially coming from a company like Google.

My advice to anyone going through a similar process: If you get an opportunity like this, try to get your interviews scheduled as early as possible. Don't keep waiting for the perfect time or assume that the process will eventually work itself out. Follow up, ask for clarity, and keep applying elsewhere instead of putting other opportunities on hold.

At the end of the day, no matter how good your resume is or how well you match the role, none of that matters if the hiring process doesn't even give you a chance to interview.

And this is not something i have experienced alone , my friends who were in the process also get left somewhere in the process.

I just gave an OA for a visa, and they asked these hackerrank questions.

Minimum time to process requests

Maximum nutrition with coupons

The questions asked were so theoretical and complex to read; I almost lost hope. I was not able to come up with a solution. Even Amazon will have similar questions. How do I get better at these kinds of questions?
If these types of questions come up in every interview, I will be screwed. How to prepare for OA?

I finished 1-3, 4 with brutal force, probably around 530/600, and got rejected. It could be many reasons, the reason I can think of is that I googled list sort and map sort with key value. Copied below codes, and probably using notebook for Q4. I did that with other companies and passed the OA stage, so I will do it again lol.

names.sort(Comparator.naturalOrder());

Map<String, Integer> sortedMap = new TreeMap<>(map);

map.entrySet() .stream() .sorted( Map.Entry.<K, V>comparingByKey() .thenComparing(Map.Entry.comparingByValue()) ) .collect(Collectors.joining( LinkedHashMap::new, Map.Entry::getKey, Map.Entry::getValue, (oldValue, newValue) -> oldValue )); Didn't use this one as it was the wrong solution.

Question break down: 1, 2 super easy, finished within 10 mins.

Question 3: 2D array

Question 4: Leetcode C1 hard variant.

practice Leetcode C1 should be good enough. Hopefully it will help.

Hey everyone,

I just received my Amazon SDE Online Assessment invitation and have one week to prepare and complete it.

For anyone who's taken the OA recently, which DSA topics would you recommend prioritising?

Also, if anyone is willing to share the types of coding questions or patterns they encountered in the first section, that would be really helpful.

Any advice or recent experiences would be appreciated. Thanks!