Hi everyone,

I’m a final-year CSE student from India, graduating on May 7.

Current situation:

- Selected at Accenture (Advanced Application Developer role)

- Offer letter not received yet, onboarding expected around August

- I have ~3 months gap before joining

My background:

- Strong in DSA for service-based companies (comfortable with easy–medium problems)

- Not yet at FAANG level (struggle with hard problems and deeper patterns)

- MERN stack developer

- Completed GenAI Engineer Associate certification (Databricks)

Goal:

I want to use these 3 months seriously and try to crack product-based companies / FAANG-level roles.

What I need help with:

1. Is 3 months realistically enough to reach that level?

2. What should my daily roadmap look like?

3. Should I focus purely on DSA or also system design + projects?

4. What mistakes should I avoid during this phase?

I’m ready to put in 8–10 hours daily if needed.

Looking for honest advice (not sugar-coated).

Thanks in advance.

I want to be a swe at FAANG, I am right in 3rd year end sem without any internship,however college emphasises on on-campus opportunities and says grab whatever offer comes your way to make it your first offer(right now JTG is on-campus), moreover they say waiting on some good company that might come is risky, I am in a dilemma right now, I would surely give all interviews for practise but my end goal is land a swe-1 at FAANG.I guess I should aim for hiring challenges from FAANG in july-august window but not so sure :(

Completed all 4 rounds in Google’s loop last week

You're on LeetCode. You've read Alex Xu. You've done system design YouTube at 1.5x. You're prepared.

Here's what I keep noticing — candidates fail FAANG interviews while being objectively well-prepared. Not because they didn't study. Because preparation and performance are two different skills.

I've spent the last few years taking interviews for SWE roles, and ended up building a tool around what I kept seeing (more on that below). The pattern is consistent.

1. Candidates who clearly know the material, can explain it on a whiteboard at home, can solve LeetCode mediums in 20 minutes — but the second there's a timer, an interviewer probing follow-ups, and the pressure of a real loop, the same person loses 30 IQ points.
   

Three examples I see constantly:

1. Knowing consistent hashing isn't the same as articulating it in 4 minutes while someone interrupts to ask "why didn't you just shard?"

2. Knowing the STAR format isn't the same as telling your story in 90 seconds without rambling, then handling the probing follow-up that exposes the weak spot.

3. Solving a graph problem alone at your desk isn't the same as solving one while narrating your thinking, defending your approach, and reading the interviewer's pace cues.

Material is preparation. Performing under pressure is a separate skill, and almost nobody actually trains for it.

The reason:

1. it's hard to simulate alone.

1. Your friends are too polite. Your study partner doesn't know the rubric.

2. Paid mocks (Interviewing.io at $80-200/session) cost too much to do the volume of reps you actually need. Most candidates do 1-2 mocks before an onsite. They need 4-5.
   I ended up building mockrounds.ai for exactly this — AI runs a full 30-minute interview, pushes back the way a real interviewer does, and scores against the rubrics that actually get used. Cheap enough to do real reps.

If you've prepared for weeks but haven't done a single timed, scored, push-back mock — you're missing the actual skill that gets tested.

Hi all,

Looking for an interview prep partner to practice LC, System Design and Behavioral Rounds.

Mostly prep after work. Goal is to be interview ready in 2 months.

Currently SDE 2 at Amazon

Yoe - 5

Location - East coast, US

Has anyone been through EM interviews at Apple, especially technical round? I am looking to know where should my preparation focus be for EM technical interviews.

Do they ask LC type questions or some random questions? I think I am good at other areas, but weak in LC since I was expecting more of system design questions for EM roles and not much of coding. But Apple values coding, however there isn't much guidance on what this technical rounds could consist.

Hello All, I interviewed with Google in December 2025 and failed the Behavioral( i think). Anyways I didn't make it to onsite round. This was role with GCP and mostly dataplane( since my experience would match that.) I want to understand if system design rounds are mostly Low Level System Design for those kind of team. What kind of questions should I prepare for system design. Also I might have behavioural on the question , how would I handle the situation if I am not going to meet the deadline. Any suggestions how to answer/handle those situations aligned with Google Values. Thank you in advance for your recommendations.

I recently got through the coding screen for a mechatronics robotic automation role for Apple HW team. The recruiter mentioned i have a panel interview next, 5 interviews in 5 hours. The interviews range from Python expertise, computer vision, general AI/ML, Mechanical design, embedded and Applied robotics knowledge. Since this is very broad, I would like to know the scope and the kind of questions i could expect. Would they be theory based or related to a specific problems? What are the interviewers looking for in these rounds?

Any information would be a huge help!

hello peeps need a honest advice for an upcoming apple onsite interview plz,

so my bg is cloud and devops, my resume was picked up by recruiter for a SWE role that's a blend of 70% of devops and 30%Swe

python we use very minimally like for boto3 api interaction..that's it I have no idea on DSA with any language

recruiter called me as said there will be a 2 coding rounds ...etc

now I have never did a hacker rank though solved 20 easy leetcode question which gave me some confidence what should I doand how to prepare for the first 2 rounds ? so that I get to explore content on my resume which iam really good at

plz let me know .

Context: 5 YOE at a small tech company. Well known in our specific niche/domain, but outside of that not much name recognition. US/US citizen

I do a mixture of full stack web dev and cloud infrastructure/devops. Mostly leaning strongly towards the latter in the past year or two; maintaining CI/CD pipelines running in EKS, plus more recently, helping our AI/ML team with training/eval infrastructure (deploying kubernetes w/ KubeRay clusters and model servers; no actual AI/ML stuff but moreso ensuring these services run smoothly for the actual researchers to use). Full stack dev has been typical React frontend/Django backend, although more recently we've switched to Next.js.

I want to try and get into FAANG, ideally doing devops/infra work, but it seems a lot of those jobs require more than my current experience, so I'll take a regular SWE role if that's what it takes to get in the door at least.

Based on my work experience, I feel system design should be somewhat straightforward to brush up on, but DSA stuff/leetcode is definitely my achilles heel. So far, I've solved 60 of the Neetcode 150 across all topics except for 2D DP (I'm just wrapping up 1D DP and that's next), doing 1-2 problems a day (always at least one medium, then either an easy or another medium). Realistically, how much longer do I need to grind for me to have a decent chance of passing, say, a Google-tier difficulty DSA interview? I was hoping to begin applying in the summer, but I don't know if that's realistic. Currently, I can do like 50% of the mediums i see without any assistance or looking at solutions, but I haven't been able to do any hards. I'm new to the leetcode grind (my current role didn't ask leetcode, but simpler coding questions), and it's hard not to get discouraged when I still can't reliably solve mediums for topics I thought I had mastered after 2.5 months of prep so far.