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?

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.

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 ?

Was at AWS and wasn’t happy with my team so I moved to another team and it was even shittier. Left for another company and now even though my team is good I keep regretting leaving AWS and losing the title.

I want to get into Google so badly. Went into matching twice over more than a year and never got a single call. I feel like I fucked up my interviews and I’m constantly feeling like I’m not good enough.

Now I don’t even know what to focus on. Learning my current job, system design, LeetCode or AI stuff so I’m not behind on everything.

I’m so fucking tired of always feeling like I’m making the wrong decisions and never being satisfied with where I am. Why can’t I just be happy with what I have and stop feeling like shit all the time. Why are there people in shittier jobs and less pay and still feel good about themselves while I can’t?

When do I get to rest and feel like I’m doing enough

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?

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.

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

​

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.

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!

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.

Anyone got shortlisted for Hugohub interview? Sde or SRE?

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!

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!

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?

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!

I’ve noticed more companies giving practical tasks lately, like debugging an existing codebase, adding a feature, or fixing something in a RAG pipeline, instead of classic algorithm questions.

For those who’ve interviewed recently, is that what you’re seeing too? And how did you prepare for it? Most practice sites I found are still mostly for DSA.

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?

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?

Non EU citizen. Waiting for team match. I did get one match very quickly in Dublin but due to headcount issues I got put back into the pool and it’s been two months so far with no activity. I am open to all locations in EU. Does anyone have any idea as to how bad it is for L5?

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?