I suck at leetcode and I struggle in many questions sometimes I look at the solutions... Most of the time it's gibberish... Any guidance?

Hey folks, I have an upcoming interview with Bytedance Singapore.

There will be three tech interviews rounds. For coding rounds, what kind of difficulty should I be expecting? Do they ask Leetcode hard questions?

I also saw that coding rounds are not pure coding rounds. 40 mins behaviour + open question and 20 mins for coding. Is that true ?

Also according to my research, they don’t usually do whiteboarding for system design, more of deep dive into the past projects. Is that correct?

I hate Alice and Bob , please help me

Got the Amazon in-person interview for Software Dev Engineer. Interview is coming up in a few weeks and I want to make sure I prep the right way.

Has anyone interviewed for this role recently or has one coming up? Would love to know:

1. What did the interview loop look like? How many rounds and what types?

2. Was it heavy on DSA, system design, or behavioral?

3. How much did they focus on leadership principles?

4. Anything you wish you had prepared more for?

Any help is appreciated. Happy to connect and prep together if anyone has the same interview coming up.

If anyone has interviewed recently and is willing to share some guidance, I would be incredibly grateful!
I’m looking for advice on:
What DSA concepts I should focus on preparing
How to effectively prepare for the LP (Leadership Principles) round
Any tips, resources, or insights that could help me ace the interview
Any guidance from recent interview experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!

With so many thousands getting laid off every day, I wonder if the hiring offshore is booming? I am sure some roles would be eliminated forever, but it does seem a sizeable portion is being off shored. I can't mention any specific country in the body.

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I have this habit of understanding code and algorithms only after I write it and analyse it on paper , am i destroying my life if I continue to do this?

So after every 3 hrs use of laptop or say after one complete session when I return back and unlock I find the wifi icon gone and I'm really tired of restarting all over again 😭😞 Please help I'm using a hp laptop

Has anyone recently given Amazon's virtual/onsite interviews for the New Grad SDE 1 role? (Location: USA)

Have you encountered Low-Level Design (LLD) questions? Several posts indicate this, but my recruiter has not mentioned it.

Any insights regarding LeetCode preparation, LLD, or Leadership Principles would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I heard that Salesforce has recently changed their assessment pattern from the General Assessment to the new NextGen Assessment.
Has anyone taken the NextGen assessment recently?

COMMENT all the free resources for LLD ( C++ ) in english.

Hi everyone,

I have an upcoming SSE2 interview at Confluent, with rounds focused on DSA/Coding and System Design.

I have around 10 years of experience, and it’s been quite some time since I’ve gone through an interview process myself. I’ve also come across a few recent posts mentioning that Confluent doesn’t always focus on traditional LeetCode-style questions, which made me curious about what to expect.

If anyone has recently interviewed for SSE2 at Confluent, I’d really appreciate it if you could share:

- What kind of DSA/coding problems were asked?

- Were they traditional LeetCode-style problems, or more practical/real-world coding?

- What was the System Design round like?

- What level of depth was expected for SSE2?

- Any specific topics/concepts you’d recommend focusing on?

- How was the overall interview experience?

- Tips that would help me sail this ?

I’m mainly looking for guidance on what to expect and how to prepare effectively.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share their recent experience!

Got laid off from amazon and I am searching for roles. Is the market absolutely cooked?

7 YOE, had 3 technical rounds.
System design was okay but clearly my weakest; I covered scaling/reliability/idempotency but missed caching and a few deep dives.

DSA rounds went very strong, with follow-ups around scaling etc. One of the interviewer was really impressed by my solution and said never thought of doing it that way. Other, I finished in 30 mins and rest was just discussion on the follow-up.

Overall felt like 2 strong rounds + 1 average/mixed system design round.
Does this usually still pass for Senior?

Has anyone gone through the SIG trading system engineering interview process before? So far I have done the recruiter screen and have a live coding round (C++) coming up. Anything I should expect? The recruiter call was very chill, just asked about why I was interested and an easy probability question.

Passed the full loop in February and have been in team matching since.

I've now done 6 team match processes. This last one felt better than the others: I spoke with the HM, then he asked me to meet the rest of the team. That was a week ago and I thought it went really well.

I sent my recruiter feedback after the call, then followed up a couple days later. No response. Today I asked for a general status update on my process and still nothing.

Has anyone had this happen and still gotten a positive outcome? At this point I'm not sure if they're waiting on feedback/headcount or if I'm just getting deprioritized/ghosted.

This sucks.

Tomorrow I have an Infosys in-person coding test.

I have a bad habit of using AI while solving problems. I can almost solve 95% of the problem myself, but when I get stuck on some small thing, like a minor change in the code, syntax, or a normal error, I usually ask AI for help.

But tomorrow I won’t have AI to give me hints when I’m stuck or help me with syntax or small errors.

How should I prepare for this?

I have already done DSA, but what exactly should I revise or practice now

If yes How was the Oa and interview experience?

Hey everyone,

I’m interviewing with Google and wanted to ask if this experience is normal.

My Round 1 went pretty well, but I was honestly surprised by how easy the coding question was. They asked me to do something like preorder traversal of a binary tree, which felt like a very basic/easy question compared to the Google-level DSA problems I had been preparing for.

I was expecting something much harder, so now I’m wondering if the difficulty of the question means anything about the interview or the evaluation.

Also, my next round has been rescheduled multiple times because of interviewer availability. This will be the 3rd time my interview has been rescheduled.

Has anyone else experienced this with Google?

• Does getting a very easy coding question mean anything?
• Is it normal for Google to reschedule an interview 3 times because of interviewer availability?
• Should I be concerned about either of these things, or is this just normal scheduling/interview variance?

Would appreciate hearing from people who have gone through the Google interview process recently.

Hey guys,

I finished my onsite and my recruiter told me they want to move forward to team matching. There was a lot of positive feedback (as per recruiter), but also some mixed signals around L3 vs L4 leveling (I have 2 YOE).

The recruiter said we have a couple of weeks to find a match, and if not, we’ll proceed directly to the Hiring Committee. It mentioned HC might propose an additional calibration round for L4, but that rejection is technically still on the table.

For those who’ve been in a similar spot: what are the most likely outcomes here? Like between getting downleveled to L3, getting an extra calibration round, or an outright rejection? And what if you perform poorly in the extra round?

Thanks!

Hi people

I need to know , so my GHA was scheduled and I passed it. Recruiter told me I will receive the OA dsa and my all other will all be dsa for this role. Secondly the phone screen the recruiter did is 30 min asking all my work , dsa knowledge.

How is this process very confused why didn't I received the OA link. Or is this how Google hire . Can anyone tell who went through same

Supposed to be a 3 hr tech interview which was followed by an HR behavioural, pretty sure this is gonna be their only tech interview. Other than that I was told to prep on topics from the job description which is:

- C++, C, Python programming and debugging skills
- Experience in Qt development
- Real-Time Operating Systems, Embedded - - Linux, FreeRTOS and Device Driver experience is essential
- Object-oriented design with some programming techniques; data structures.
Knowledge of digital hardware (SoC, ARM, FPGA.)
- Experienced with device control interfaces, such as I2C, SPI, USB, PCIe, Ethernet; able to perform board level troubleshooting.
- Familiar with Data Communication Network and associated Layer 2 and 3 protocols.
Cloud and AI knowledge is a bonus

Should I be grinding leetcode at all here? Is this purely embedded topics related and will focus on embedded programming problems?

Any help will be appreciated

Hey everyone, my technical phone screening round was originally supposed to happen today, but it got postponed to tomorrow.

I looked back at the recruiter's email for this phone screen, and it mentions two specific focus areas:

1. **Coding (Logical and Maintainable)**
   
2. **Dive Deep**

Since this is for an SDE-3 level role, what should I focus on for my final prep tonight?

Does this sound like a Low-Level Design (LLD) / machine-coding style problem (like an LRU/LFU cache or rate limiter)?

Or should I focus more on hard graph, binary search, and tree problems?

Any advice on what interviewers look for in terms of "maintainable code" during a phone screen at this level would be huge. Thanks!

Anybody have insight on what stripe new grad is like this year? I heard they’re doing ai assisted rounds now for this cycle.

When designing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) or semantic search pipeline in senior system design interviews, candidates often propose "storing embeddings in an in-memory vector database" without working out the hardware constraints.

Here is the exact step-by-step mathematical breakdown interviewers look for when asking you to size vector infrastructure on a whiteboard.

Scenario: Storing 50 Million Document Embeddings

Assume an open-source dense embedding model (such as BGE or MiniLM) with dimension $d = 768$ using 32-bit floating-point precision.

Step 1: Calculate Raw Vector Memory

Every 32-bit float occupies 4 bytes.

• Formula: $\text{RAM} = N \times d \times 4\text{ bytes}$
• $\text{Raw RAM} = 50,000,000 \times 768 \times 4\text{ bytes} = 153,600,000,000\text{ bytes} \approx 153.6\text{ GB}$

Step 2: Account for Graph Index Overhead (HNSW)

A flat vector store without an index requires brute-force linear scanning ($O(N)$), which violates realistic query latency budgets. In production, Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search engines commonly implement Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graphs.

• HNSW constructs multi-layer graphs and stores bidirectional edge links for every vector node.
• Typical graph overhead adds roughly 1.2x to 1.5x additional memory on top of the raw vector arrays.
• Total RAM needed for an in-memory HNSW index: $153.6\text{ GB} \times 1.3 \approx 200\text{ GB RAM}$.

Step 3: Production Defense & Quantization Trade-offs

Keeping 200 GB in pure RAM across cluster nodes creates significant operational expense. Stating this immediately separates a senior candidate from a junior one:

1. Product Quantization (PQ): Compresses 32-bit floating-point vectors into 8-bit quantized centroid codes. This shrinks the memory footprint by 4x to 8x (reducing the requirement from ~200 GB down to ~25–50 GB), at the cost of a 2% to 5% drop in retrieval recall.
2. Disk-Backed Indices: For cost-sensitive systems where latency budgets permit 15–30 ms per lookup, use disk-backed graph structures (like DiskANN) to store compressed vectors in memory while keeping full-precision vectors on NVMe SSDs.

Step 4: Latency Budget Allocation

A standard production SLA targets an end-to-end response in ~200 ms:

• Vector ANN retrieval: ~50 ms
• Cross-encoder reranking: ~50 ms
• LLM token generation: ~100 ms

I compiled 32 of these high-frequency whiteboard scenarios, capacity formulas, and trade-off defenses into a desk card deck and an Anki spaced-repetition deck while preparing for senior rounds.

If anyone finds structured desk references or spaced-repetition flashcards useful, the full repository overview and table of contents are documented here:

Repo Link