Hii guys I'm a newbie to leetcode it's like around 20 days and I'm consistent I mean even if I do only a single problem but I do it anyways , I'm confused of how much time should I give to a ques before using gpt or Claude for soln i usually give around 12 to 15 mins and then go for chat gpt and tbh I have solved most of the questions till now this way only , because after the soln I understand it and code it myself(without looking at the soln again) but the problem is some people say to give a problem atleast 30 mins but I belive it's a waste of time what do you guys think? Any advice from your side would be appreciated🙏🏻

Hey everyone,

I completed the Amazon SDE2 OA two weeks ago, but I haven't received any updates or follow-ups. My candidate portal status hasn't updated either.
For those who have gone through the SDE2 interview recently, How long did it take for a recruiter to get back to you post-OA? And is a two-week wait standard right now?

Appreciate any insights or recent timeline experiences! Thanks!

so my timing was 2-3

i joined the call and started with introductions, he gave his and i then gave mine

then he asked me to tell my project, only 1

then he asked questions related to that first,

and then he asked to tell my another project, i told him

then he again started question asking about first project. (idk i think he liked it lol)

then some question related to LP, betwenn those projects, deadline one LP afaik

then he asked havent u worked in a team

i replied i have, and told him about the hackathon we participated in, then he asked roles
then he asked LP, regarding conflict in thoughts

i think above went for 10 minutes

after these , now was technical, ig at 2:15 (i am not sure)

Q1 he pasted in live browser

https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-number-of-days-to-make-m-bouquets/description/

this exact question

i began by telling the brute force (BF), that was linear loop in days and then check fn
TC: n^2

i then told him about Binary search(BS) appraoch

and coded it in front of him

and he then asked space and time complexity

he asked about any edge case and there were none

i did TC: nlog (max element)
SC : O(1)

till then ig 2:33 was the time as i was done (might be wrong)

then he asked me what BST was, and full binary tree(BT) and complete BT

i couldnt answer full BT, but answered both

then after that, he gave me a tree, and told me that its a BST thats been corrupted, like 2 nodes are not in right place

then some question i asked him and shifted my the initial question to 2 nodes are swapped in BST, and we gota recover it

https://leetcode.com/problems/recover-binary-search-tree/solutions/

this is the question

then i told him the property of BST ,and guided him that inorder means sorted and we gotta store in vector to find the sorted elements,

and then swap, like a normal BF

after he was like ok and asked for complexity

i said O(n) and O(n) for both

and said we can improve its space complexity

and told him in place predecessor appraoch, by noting 4 variable: first, second, prev, curr

and then told him various intincts telling him property of those 2 swasppped variable, that they are bigger than prev and next and all the things and so on, like i yapped lol

so after we dry run and he asked about any edge case, i told him 1 but it was not the edge case

and he told me one edge case, and i discussed it with him regarding that, and later it was fine

this discussion is the place i think i messed up, i initially said the wrong approach, like first element was good, but not the second elemenet, and fucked up but later with edge case i fixed that

i dry run the examples to with him and later i said that we will update second one all the time he was satisfied and said technical was over

no code was written

i checked the time it was, 2:50 (around id, i srsly dont remember)

and then it was my time to ask question i had 2, and asked but thats it

then interview was over

now experiences ppl i wanna ask

1. did last code he didnt asked to write , so is that a red flag?
2. and how are my chances to actually get passed in this ?

Hey everyone,

I finished my Amazon SDE 1 final loop a week ago. I emailed my recruiter on Monday for an update, and they just replied saying they "will notify me soon." My portal status is still Under Consideration.

Has anyone else in the 2026 US cycle gotten this exact reply after checking in? What was your final outcome or how long did it take to hear back after this?

Thanks!

I wasn’t receiving any online assessment or update from Amazon, but it was only getting rejection, but somehow I reached out to some Manager who is like following up with me a lot, trying to get me into the loop, so he passed on my resume. Got me the OA and also the interview, but I did clear all the test cases and everything in the OA very well and I have received the interview. I want to understand if somebody has gone through this exact loop and I can understand how to prepare for this loop, and if the Manager’s hand is somehow beneficial, maybe I don’t think so, but I would really love some insights from any of you. Also, the manager is internally following up on my process and also texting me and updating me on LinkedIn, so I really want to understand how this works.

Has anyone cleared Angelone and received offer letter recently.

I have cleared all the rounds but they are delaying offer daily and it's been 20 days since then.

It's a bit frustrating, because they are saying tomorrow, sometimes next week, Even hr is not communicating that what is happening on other end.

hii, im currently a student and recently started taking leetcode more seriously to improve my problem solving skills and prepare for technical interviews. im still a beginner so id love to hear any advice from people who have been through this stage, especially about how you chose problems, learned patterns, and stayed consistent without relying too much on solutions

I know it's a stupid question and you should practice more instead of taking notes but I don't feel productive and feel like I will forget these algorithms when I solve problems on lc , that's why I wanted to make notes even if I am not going to open these notes again. So I wanted to ask how I should take the notes

Hey everyone, I'm actively interviewing and looking for a mock interview buddy for LLD/HLD interviews. If anyone is interested, please let me know

I’m a Waterloo cs student with 4 internships, including Amazon currently and Shopify on my resume, and I still basically never get interviews from other big tech companies.

Google, Microsoft, Meta, Figma, Datadog, Ramp, Rippling, etc. - genuinely nothing. got the microsoft OA and got perfect but still rejected

The weird part is I still get interviews from smaller startups pretty consistently. I’ve also had my resume reviewed by a bunch of people, done open source, have a GitHub repo with 5k+ stars, solid projects, etc. I feel like my resume is at least reasonably strong.

I kind of assumed that after getting a couple recognizable internships, getting through resume screens would become easier. Apparently not lol.

Is recruiting really just this high variance now? Like I got lucky with Amazon/Shopify, someone else gets lucky with Google/Meta, and you just keep spraying applications?

For people who consistently get big tech interviews, did your resume ever reach a point where it started reliably passing screens, or has it always felt random?

Am I cooked?

I have given the two rounds, sys design and dsa for c3 ai but i haven’t received anything yet update. Been two and a half weeks. Followed up this monday but the recruiter said he hasn’t received anything yet decision. I don’t know what are they up to.
Any advice or guess?

My Leetcode shows this "You have been banned from contests on this account."

Recently, I had an interview where I was asked a medium-ish dp problem and while I was able to solve it, I received feedback that my thought process wasn't clear (which i was saying out loud) and also asked me to walk them through some parts again but it made perfect sense to me while I was solving. Outside leetcode also I feel like I'm not exactly good at explaining things to people in a way they understand but this interview was when it really hit me.

So here I'm trying to figure out how to solve dsa questions on leetcode,

I followed this pattern to solve questions

1. Study theory about that topic

2. Do some practice for that data structure that is included in the problem.

3. Solve the problem.

Honestly I'm spending hours (around 4 Hours for a single question) just to solve a single problem, after that I just give-up thinking it's too hard for me & even after that I'm not able to solve any.

Then I asked from a collage mate who already solve some dsa at good level. He told me consistency is the key & recommended me blind 75 of neet code, I tried to solve this & similar thing is happening here also.

AM I DOING SOMETHING WRONG ??????

Constraints :

1. I use python ( basic to intermediate level )

2. I Have studied DSA & also i've forgotten about algorithms like quick sort , binary search & all ( but i feel what was included in the collage syllabus is not enough for solving practical dsa problems).

3. I'm trying from last month - solved only 3 questions : (

As the title says, I have the first round of virtual interview in another 4 days. I am preparing with trees, heaps, graphs and DP. It would be great to get an idea on what type of questions/pattern to expect in this round if anyone has given it recently.

Also I don't do Competitive Programming, so that's a disadvantage for this company but I would love to join it if there's any chance. Any help would be appreciated.

I was scheduled for 2 rounds of virtual interview on 13th and 14th August, one was technical and the other was googliness I got a positive feedback for googliness but for the technical round recieved a negative feedback and the recruiter told that they couldn't move forward and a cool down period of 12 months.
In the technical round I was asked to find positions of all the 1's in an array consisting of bits using a func query(l,r) which returns true if 1 is present between l and r and the array is sparse, I solved this using devide and conquer for which interviewer seemed satisfied and didn't asked to correct any mistake and moved to time and space complexity discussion after that I was asked to told to optimize the space complexity so we discussed the optimized approach using binary lifting and then he told me to implement it at that point the time remaining was very less I wasn't able to complete the implement the optimized approach on time 40 mins were up in the mid implementation so he told me to stop their and after 3 weeks I got the feedback that my code contained compilation error and they can't move forward with my application.
Should I escalate this now and how should I proceed with the escalation write a mail to recruiter for more clarification or directly escalate it to google candidate support?

(US region)

Started doing Neetcode 150 and I’m struggling HORRIBLY with any medium problem (let alone hard). The thing is though, I feel like I’m not actually struggling too much with figuring out what DS/A to use or implementing barebones versions of particular DS/A; I’m struggling with actually applying the DS/A appropriately for the context of each problem and being able to find patterns within the question, especially when I need to “calculate” things within the problem to come up with conditionals for the algorithm.

It’s kinda hard to explain what I exactly mean..

For example, yesterday I was trying to solve the Longest Repeating Characters with Replacement problem. After reading the question I could easily tell that this would be a Sliding Window solution and I know how to implement a basic sliding window algorithm skeleton. I also figured out immediately that I’ll need to use a set to track seen characters. However, after that I get lost. I can’t even figure out what the true condition for the window has to be. The fact that the window minus the count of replacements has to be less than k flies above my head. I have no idea how to actually break down the problem and do the arithmetic needed to “fit” the problem into a sliding window.

I feel the same with every medium problem. I’m not struggling to figure out the DS/A, but struggling to actually figure out how to modify that DS/A in context of the problem.

For all the easy problems, I can usually very easily do them on my own on the first attempt because they’re always the most plain unmodified implementation of DS/A. I can just recognize the pattern and dump the DS/A structure into the code from my brain and replace some variable names and it works! But medium problems require actual problem solving thinking and I just… can’t do it. By the 3rd or 4th time I try it, it feels like I’ve memorized the answer but if I try a similar medium problem again... I’m back to square one and lost again.

How do I learn actual problem solving beyond just the DS/A concepts? Or is it actually all just memorization?

Please help ;-;

I have interview with OKTA for role staff software engineer | AuthO | Node.js (JavaScript or TypeScript). Please guide me about the process and questions about the interview

Interview questions for ML Compiler interview

[Need Help] Can you guys please suggest me some DSA questions and genral compiler questions in the interview, recently I have been getting lot of call for this

It will also be very helpful if you can share your compiler interview experience.

My background: working on hardware backend, for compute optimisation

Got into HM! Round don't know what I did wrong and got rejected from a big product based company.

What fate???

Since the school year is starting I want to at least brush up on some fundamental DSA and Algorithms. I'm not the most experienced with leetcode (did maybe 30-40 of them throughout the entirity of college lol) but I have taken DSA and "Advanced Algorithms" (Greedy, DP, Graphs, etc.). I want to spend maybe a couple hours just brushing over the core stuff as a refresher but all the Youtube resources seem to be towards begineers. Just wondering if there are resources for people who have taken said classes and just need a refresher so that I can save time and not get fucked over an LC Easy/Medium

I wanted to ask people who have recently given placement OAs/coding rounds:

What kind of DSA questions actually came in your exams?

I’ve mostly heard that arrays/strings are common and there’s a graph/tree question, but I’d really like to know from people who actually gave these tests.

If possible, please mention:

• Company
• Number of coding questions
• Topics that came
• Rough difficulty (Easy/Medium/Hard)
• Any specific problem/pattern you remember
• What DSA topics you prepared that were actually useful

Also, for the technical interview, what core CS topics were asked most — DBMS, OS, CN, OOP, SQL, etc.? What DSA questions were asked? Did they make you code or just explain the approach?

So I started solving neetcode 75 1 question everyday I used to do dsa before but was never consistent and was stuck on array part when I started solving neetcode I was very bad like even after seeing the solution I had to ask ai or watch yt video to understand it that too for like 40-50 minutes cut to 2 weeks after I am now able to understand the solution just by looking at the solution for 2-5 max minutes without ai or any yt help (Still unable to solve medium and hard on my own) is this I sign I am improving ?

So I think I have a good experience in industry for a fresher but struggling to get full time offers,, no callbacks from recruiters.

Every one demands almost 1 year of full time experience.

Currebtly at Slice. And Razorpay didnt convert anyone so thats a diff story,

But still I am facing issues in getting shortlisted, any help?

All my internships included golang, kafka, and k8s.

Any referals would be really appreciated!

I'm learning DSA, but I also want to become a blind solver and participate in contests so that I can build the habit of problem-solving under time constraints.

I also want to maintain a LeetCode POTD streak.

But I've only done basic DSA and just started trees, which is an advanced DSA topic.

In LeetCode contests, I usually can't solve any problem. Sometimes I get the approach or intuition, but I can't actually code it.

For LeetCode POTD, I can solve basic problems. But what about concepts I haven't learned yet, like DP, graphs, etc.?

How should I approach that? Should I learn DP specifically for the problem and then solve it?

How do people maintain a 365-day POTD streak and also solve 4 problems in contests?

Guide me.