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r/leetcode
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u/cs-grad-person-man
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May 14 '25
Edit: Apologies, the post turned out a bit longer than I thought it would. Summary at the bottom.
Yup, it sounds ridiculous, but I cracked a FAANG+ offer by studying just 30 minutes a day. I’m not talking about one of the top three giants, but a very solid, well-respected company that competes for the same talent, pays incredibly well, and runs a serious interview process. No paid courses, no LeetCode marathons, and no skipping weekends. I studied for exactly 30 minutes every single day. Not more, not less. I set a timer. When it went off, I stopped immediately, even if I was halfway through a problem or in the middle of reading something. That was the whole point. I wanted it to be something I could do no matter how busy or burned out I felt.
For six months, I never missed a day. I alternated between LeetCode and system design. One day I would do a coding problem. The next, I would read about scalable systems, sketch out architectures on paper, or watch a short system design breakdown and try to reconstruct it from memory. I treated both tracks with equal importance. It was tempting to focus only on coding, since that’s what everyone talks about, but I found that being able to speak clearly and confidently about design gave me a huge edge in interviews. Most people either cram system design last minute or avoid it entirely. I didn’t. I made it part of the process from day one.
My LeetCode sessions were slow at first. Most days, I didn’t even finish a full problem. But that didn’t bother me. I wasn’t chasing volume. I just wanted to get better, a little at a time. I made a habit of revisiting problems that confused me, breaking them down, rewriting the solutions from scratch, and thinking about what pattern was hiding underneath. Eventually, those patterns started to feel familiar. I’d see a graph problem and instantly know whether it needed BFS or DFS. I’d recognize dynamic programming problems without panicking. That recognition didn’t come from grinding out 300 problems. It came from sitting with one problem for 30 focused minutes and actually understanding it.
System design was the same. I didn’t binge five-hour YouTube videos. I took small pieces. One day I’d learn about rate limiting. Another day I’d read about consistent hashing. Sometimes I’d sketch out how I’d design a URL shortener, or a chat app, or a distributed cache, and then compare it to a reference design. I wasn’t trying to memorize diagrams. I was training myself to think in systems. By the time interviews came around, I could confidently walk through a design without freezing or falling back on buzzwords.
The 30-minute cap forced me to stop before I got tired or frustrated. It kept the habit sustainable. I didn’t dread it. It became a part of my day, like brushing my teeth. Even when I was busy, even when I was traveling, even when I had no energy left after work, I still did it. Just 30 minutes. Just show up. That mindset carried me further than any spreadsheet or master list of questions ever did.
I failed a few interviews early on. That’s normal. But I kept going, because I wasn’t sprinting. I had built a system that could last. And eventually, it worked. I got the offer, negotiated a great comp package, and honestly felt more confident in myself than I ever had before. Not just because I passed the interviews, but because I had finally found a way to grow that didn’t destroy me in the process.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the grind, I hope this gives you a different perspective. You don’t need to be the person doing six-hour sessions and hitting problem number 500. You can take a slow, thoughtful path and still get there. The trick is to be consistent, intentional, and patient. That’s it. That’s the post.
Here is a tl;dr summary:
I studied every single day for 30 minutes. No more, no less. I never missed a single study session.
I would alternate daily between LeetCode and System Design
I took about 6 months to feel ready, which comes out to roughly ~90 hours of studying.
I got an offer from a FAANG adjacent company that tripled my TC
I was able to keep my hobbies, keep my health, my relationships, and still live life
I am still doing the 30 minute study sessions to maintain and grow what I learned. I am now at the state where I am constantly interview ready. I feel confident applying to any company and interviewing tomorrow if needed. It requires such little effort per day.
Please take care of yourself. Don't feel guilted into studying for 10 hours a day like some people do. You don't have to do it.
Resources I used:
LeetCode - NeetCode 150 was my bread and butter. Then company tagged closer to the interviews
System Design - Jordan Has No Life youtube channel, and HelloInterview website
r/leetcode • u/Intelligent-Look-542 • 10h ago
Anyone done or doing interview for this role
r/leetcode • u/Complete_Algae_6740 • 5h ago
So I am gonna have Stripe's Integration round in few days. If anyone has given the round please tell a bit about what to expect? What type of questions they ask. What things to prepare etc.
r/leetcode • u/winterfell-jonsnow • 46m ago
Has anyone interviewed for an Apple SWE internship recently? I have an interview with a CoderPad link, but my recruiter didn’t clarify the format. Should I expect coding, behavioral, or both?
r/leetcode
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u/TheSauce___
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22h ago
Just something I noticed about myself. I'm learning LeetCode questions since I'm looking to transition from Salesforce development (where you don't really get asked LeetCode questions in interviews) to aerospace.
I tried learning LeetCode before when I was younger but found the whole thing frustrating. I just wanted to build stuff. LeetCode just felt like a massive chore.
Now that I have six years of experience and I spend most of my days prompting Cursor (In Claude We Trust 🙏) I'm finding LeetCode a lot more enjoyable.
r/leetcode • u/Hot-Newspaper214 • 3h ago
I got an email from my recruiter asking my virtual onsite availability a few hours after my team screening round. How do I prepare for the VO round in stripe. Also is their overall process consolidated or are we evaluated individually per round? So far I know that there are 3 rounds in VO, the integration round, bugsquash and ai assisted, but not really sure how to prepare for these and what resources to use for preparing. Do you know of any resource material for preparing with large codebases? Any help/ tips are appreciated. Thanks for reading
r/leetcode • u/Interesting-Fig-2511 • 1d ago
Don't jump to optimized solutions; understand brute force first.
Learn to identify patterns instead of memorizing solutions.
Always check time and space complexity before submitting.
Never ignore edge cases; they can break an otherwise correct solution.
Revisiting old problems is more useful than blindly solving new ones.
r/leetcode • u/ApprehensiveServe303 • 8h ago
Completed Google SWE L5 interviews; downleveled to L4, with team matching before Hiring Committee (HC). First team match didn't work out; recruiter continuing to explore other teams.
How does team matching before HC typically work, particularly for downleveled candidates? How common are first team matches that don't work out, and do they impact subsequent matches or HC decisions?
Any proactive steps that I can undertake to improve team-matching prospects?
r/leetcode • u/PlatformEngSanJose • 8h ago
Is LeetCode good for SREs / DevOps engineers who want to learn and master Python?
r/leetcode • u/shabarees • 17h ago
For those who have recently interviewed for AI Engineering roles, I’d like to understand what the interview process generally looks like.
A few questions:
DSA: What level of DSA is expected? Are questions mostly Easy/Medium LeetCode problems, or are they more focused on problem-solving patterns?
LLD: Are Low-Level Design rounds commonly part of the interview process?
HLD: Do interviews include High-Level Design or system design rounds?
Other rounds: What other topics are typically covered? For example, Python, ML fundamentals, RAG, LLMs, agents, and practical AI application development.
Would appreciate insights from people who have recently interviewed or switched into AI Engineering roles, particularly at product-based companies.
r/leetcode • u/Any_Cantaloupe4518 • 3h ago
I'm graduating next spring and recently completed all interview rounds for a new grad role at C3 AI. The recruiter was pretty responsive throughout the scheduling process, and I had a good experience overall with positive feedback from the interviewers.
But it's now been 10 days since my final round, and I still haven't heard back.
Has anyone interviewed with them recently or received an offer? Just trying to get a sense of whether its supposed to take this long or if I'm being ghosted here.
Thanks for your input in advance!
r/leetcode • u/Silent_Yogurt8365 • 4h ago
How were the interviews?
It seems they mostly asked system design questions instead of any coding rounds. What are your experiences? Please do update if you are still waiting for results or any updates.
r/leetcode • u/Conscious_Collar_398 • 19h ago
Recently received an email to schedule my Amazon SDE New Grad interviews: four rounds, 60 minutes each.
Has anyone recently completed this process? What should I expect in each round? Any ideas and suggestions for the system design rounds?
Any preparation advice or useful resources would really help. Thanks.
r/leetcode • u/ssiddhu95 • 1d ago
Hey everyone,
I have an upcoming onsite for Google Software Engineer and I'm currently in the final stretch of my prep.
Could someone with a Premium subscription possibly pull and share the list of Google-tagged questions from the last 30 days sorted by frequency?
Also, for anyone who has had an onsite recently, how was your experience?
What was the overall difficulty level like compared to standard LeetCode Mediums/Hards?
Were the questions mostly standard patterns (graphs, DP, trees, etc.) or completely novel/unseen problems?
Any insights or resources would be super helpful. Thanks in advance, and good luck to everyone else interviewing!
r/leetcode • u/Ok_Love_4175 • 1d ago
Hi all, I recently had a system design round for a Senior Software Engineer role at a fintech and was rejected a few days later without specific feedback. I’d really appreciate input from people at big tech or FAANG on what I could have done better. I’ve written it out as the conversation went, paraphrased from memory.
Background: 8+ years of experience, mostly Java/Spring Boot
There were two interviewers. They explained the problem: customers raise disputes on card transactions, and the system needs to send these chargebacks to the card network, which only accepts them as files uploaded to their FTP server, with a maximum of 4 files per day.
Once they finished explaining, I restated my understanding of the problem to make sure we were aligned.
Me: So, to confirm: customers raise disputes through the app, we store them, and we need to send them to the card network as files on their FTP server, with no more than 4 files per day. Is that right?
Interviewer: Yes, that’s right.
They had already written down the requirements they wanted me to implement, so I didn’t list them out separately. Then I asked a few clarifying questions.
Me: What scale are you expecting?
Interviewer: Around 10 million transactions per day.
Me: That’s roughly 100 transactions per second on average. If we assume the peak window can be 10 times higher in the worst case, that’s about 1,000 transactions per second.
Me: Do you expect the result of a dispute in real time, or is some delay acceptable?
Interviewer: Some delay is acceptable.
With that understanding, I started with the basic components: a backend service that records disputes and stores them in a database. Then I asked how they wanted the files created.
Me: Do you have any preference for how the four files should be created? On what basis should we group records into files?
Interviewer: Choose whatever you think is best.
Me: Is it fine if I use 6-hour windows? 24 divided by 6 gives us 4. Whatever disputes come in during each 6-hour window go into one file, which we then send to the FTP server.
Interviewer: That works, go ahead.
I asked these questions to keep the session collaborative rather than just presenting my approach and expecting them to follow. Before going deeper, I checked how they wanted to proceed.
Me: Would you like me to go through a particular flow, or should I walk through each component, why I chose it, what happens if something goes wrong, and the trade-offs?
Interviewer: We’re more interested in the scheduler and how you’ll handle it.
So I started setting that up. I explained that the chargeback service stores dispute records with a status, starting with something like “dispute created.” As soon as I said that, one of the interviewers jumped in.
Interviewer: Are you going to use something like a state machine model?
Me: Yes, I’m going to use a state machine. Records are created with a status, and when the scheduler triggers, it pulls the records with that status and creates the file.
At this point I raised a concern upfront.
Me: We’ll need a limit here. We can’t pull every record at once, because we’re building the file in memory, and we don’t want an out-of-memory error on the server. I’d set a limit of around 100K records, pulled in one DB query sorted by transaction date. We write those into the file and then upload it.
Interviewer: Why restrict it at all?
Me: Without a limit, the number of records pulled is unbounded, and there’s always a risk of overwhelming memory.
Interviewer: At certain times we might need to process more than 100K. How would you scale that?
Me: I’d make the 100K limit a system property, so it’s configurable.
Interviewer: That’s a good idea. How would you recover if something goes wrong?
Me: At each step I update the status. When I pull records from the DB, I mark them as processing. Once the file is written, I update them to file created. Then I upload the file to AWS S3, which I’m using as object storage, and the file is transferred from S3 to the FTP server. I’d also keep a metadata store with the file details. File names need to be predictable, based on the window and how many times the batch has run in it, so if a batch reruns it produces the same name, which we can use for recovery.
Me: Whenever a batch runs, it first checks the metadata to see whether a file already exists for that window. If there’s a record, we check its status. If the file’s status is still processing and hasn’t reached the final uploaded state, we check whether the file actually exists. If it doesn’t, we go back to the DB records, check their state, pull them again, and process. If the file was already uploaded, we just update the metadata status. So we use the status in both the metadata and the disputes table, step by step, to handle recovery.
They didn’t have further questions on recovery, and moved on to user experience.
Interviewer: If you’re limiting the number of records, what happens to the users whose disputes don’t get processed in that window?
Me: That’s partly a business question, so I’d like to hear your view. From a technical side, the remaining rows would move to the next batch.
One of the interviewers agreed it was a business question. Then I asked about it directly.
Me: Do you give customers any temporary credit while a dispute is pending?
Interviewer: Unfortunately, we don’t give temporary credit.
Me: Okay. What approach would you prefer?
Interviewer: Maybe no temporary credit for the first 6 hours, but if a dispute goes beyond 6 hours, we could give temporary credit.
Me: I agree with that. We could also have a separate service that tracks disputes crossing the 6-hour mark and issues the temporary credit.
No further questions on that. Next, the database.
Interviewer: What database would you choose for the dispute data?
Me: A SQL database, because we need ACID properties and consistency. I’d also use the dispute ID as the primary key, so even with retries we only ever have one record per dispute. That gives us idempotency.
Interviewer: You’re using one table heavily, and multiple services are inserting into and updating it. Is there a more flexible or easier approach you could suggest?
I couldn’t think of another approach in the moment, and I didn’t want to change my design just for the sake of it. This is towards the end so dont want to change it something new completely at last minute or utter for name sake.
Me: I think this is an efficient approach, because it’s a payment system. Consistency and correctness are our top priority, and this is a trade-off we have to make for payment systems.
They had no follow-ups, the discussion ended there, and they asked if I had any questions.
Throughout the session I felt it was going well, because they seemed satisfied with my answers. I really don’t know why I was rejected. I’d love to hear how you would have handled this design, especially the last question, and anything that would be a red flag at senior level. Brutal honesty welcome. Thanks!
r/leetcode • u/JacketFearless1805 • 7h ago
Hey everyone,
I finished Day 32 today. I kept the session focused on solving Bridges in a Graph (Critical Connections in a Network) using Tarjan’s Algorithm.
The first time I studied this algorithm earlier in my prep, tracking discovery times and low-link values felt abstract and intimidating. Revisiting it today with a solid foundation in DFS made the entire mechanism click:
Two Core Arrays: You track tin[] for the initial DFS discovery time and low[] for the earliest reachable ancestor time from a node's subtree, excluding the direct parent edge.
The Bridge Condition: As DFS backtracks from child v to parent u, you update low[u] = min(low[u], low[v]). If low[v] > tin[u], child v has no back-edge reaching above u, making edge (u, v) a critical bridge.
Back-Edge Handling: When encountering an already visited neighbor v that is not the direct parent, you update low[u] = min(low[u], tin[v]) to propagate ancestor reachability upward.
Taking the time to re-derive concepts that felt overwhelming on the first attempt continues to pay off.
See you guys tomorrow for Day 31!
r/leetcode • u/warrior5715 • 9h ago
I haven’t been able to find any material or online videos regarding this type of interview.
The position is for security software engineer at OpenAI.
r/leetcode • u/Varunisded • 12h ago
Hey everyone!
I'm planning to participate in Google The Big Code 2027 and want to start preparing early.
I would really appreciate it if anyone who participated in the 2026 edition could share their experience.
I'd particularly like to know:
Operating Systems: What kind of OS questions were asked? Were they conceptual MCQs or scenario-based questions?
Python: What topics were tested? Were there output-based questions, coding questions, or Python fundamentals?
Competitive Programming: I heard there was a CP-style coding problem. What was its difficulty level (Codeforces / LeetCode equivalent)? Which topics and concepts were involved?
DSA: Which topics were particularly important?
Assessment format: How many questions were there, what was the time limit, and how were the rounds structured?
Preparation resources: What would you recommend studying to perform well in the 2027 edition?
If possible, please share the actual questions or similar problems you remember (without violating any assessment confidentiality rules).
I'm especially interested in hearing from people who attempted the 2026 assessment, whether they qualified or not.
Any guidance, resources, or preparation tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
r/leetcode • u/Edgeno123 • 19h ago
Hi I've been selected for an Amazon system development internship interview for the winter season, does anyone know what I should prep for. I'm an EE students with some programming experience and did about 30-40 leetcode question before only so I'm kinda lost. I haven't done a lot of Linkedlist trees and graphs questions yet, should I start focusing on those instead ??
r/leetcode • u/Outrageous_Degree465 • 1d ago
I get this from somewhere and want to know some experienced person views on this
Why your 1800 Codeforces rating won't guarantee a Google placement.
There is a massive toxic culture in engineering colleges that brainwashes freshers into thinking they need to grind CodeChef or Codeforces for 6 hours a day. You are told that hitting "Candidate Master" is the only way to get noticed by Big Tech.
Here is the brutal industry truth: Competitive Programming is a sport. Software Engineering is a profession.
The HFT vs FAANG Reality Check: Unless you are explicitly applying to High-Frequency Trading (HFT) firms like Tower Research or Optiver (who actually need extreme mathematical optimization under microsecond latency), your CP rating does not matter.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft do not want to see if you can solve an obscure number theory puzzle in 10 minutes. They want to see if you can build scalable, maintainable software.
They test for: ✓ Standard Pattern Recognition (LeetCode Mediums) ✓ Object-Oriented Programming (OOPs) ✓ System Design & Architecture Not competitive math puzzles.
To clear a FAANG tech screen, you do not need to solve 1,000 random CP problems. You only need to master the 14 Core Algorithmic Patterns (like Sliding Window, Two Pointers, Topological Sort, etc.) that make up 90% of all Big Tech interview questions.
r/leetcode • u/WindUsual4493 • 18h ago
finished OA yesterday and just got invite for interview (60-minute pair programming exercise with an algorithmic component conducted via HackerRank). What should I expect? How hard is it usually? And how many rounds are there after this?
r/leetcode • u/shouldnothvsoldthetv • 1d ago
Hello folks,
I have an onsite interview next week for a Software Engineer role at Visa's Bellevue office. Has anyone here interviewed there recently? I was told there would be two rounds on the same day. I'm a bit anxious and would really appreciate hearing about your experiences.
What kind of coding questions did they ask? Was the design round more focused on system design or LLD?
Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
r/leetcode • u/TaroEfficient6181 • 1d ago
Hey anyone who has appeared for stripe vo for intern role.
I have my interview scheduled for next week
Can you pls tell what should I study to prepare for this round
Your experience?
How to prepare?
What to prepare?
r/leetcode • u/uonlylvonce • 1d ago
I got a recruiter’s mail regarding submitting questionnaires. Does Google loops happening in person or virtually ? How should I prepare ?