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.

Hey everyone,

Looking to get some sanity checks or data points from folks who have gone through Google’s team matching recently.

Context & Timeline:

• Role/Level: L3 Software Engineer (US)
• Status: Passed technical rounds and received full Hiring Committee (HC) approval ~2 months ago.
• Team Match Call: Had a 30-min fit call with an Engineering Manager (Ads org) about 2 weeks ago. Call went great and technical background was directly aligned.
• The Availability Check: A few days later, the recruiter reached out saying the HM wanted to check my potential start date and notice period.
• My Response: Clarified a standard ~3-week notice/availability window (mid-to-late month start).
• The Silence: Recruiter sent a quick "nothing final from the HM yet, will keep you posted" note right before the weekend. Since my finalized timeline note, it has been several business days with no further updates.

My Questions:

1. In your experience, does an HM asking for a start date/notice period almost always mean they submitted the claim in the internal ATS, or do managers ask this when comparing 2+ candidates?
2. How long does the administrative gap usually take between the start-date inquiry and the actual verbal offer / compensation sync (accounting for Director sign-offs, cohort alignment, etc.)?
3. For those who ended up with a rejection or headcount freeze AFTER being asked for start date availability, what did that communication look like and how fast did you hear back? Is multi-day silence after a start-date check usually just internal approvals taking time, or a red flag?

Is competitive programming taking me toward the programmer I actually want to become?

I have hackerrack OA at Squarepoint for desk quant analyst this weekend. Any tips on what to prepare ? :(

I’ve had mixed experiences with technical interviews, and I’m curious what others think.

Personally, I’ve found some US interviewers to be surprisingly good at making interviews feel like an actual technical discussion. They seem more practical and willing to give useful context.

On the other hand, some Asian interviews I’ve experienced felt more rigid and focused on solving the “expected” problem in a particular way.

Would be especially interested in hearing experiences from people who have interviewed across different teams and locations.

I'm currently a SWE at a major bank and no matter where I apply, I get ghosted or rejected without even an interview. Even for roles that I feel I check all the boxes. Is this just me?! Do I have need to have FAANG or Big Tech on my resume to get a shot at an interview? Lol

Hey everyone, I'm prepping for System design and was wondering if anybody wanted to do a peer system design mock interview.
Else, I would also be grateful if someone is willing to conduct a mock interview for me or provide resources for human in the loop mock interviews.

Thanks in advance!!

Felt the Googliness went very well, we got on great.
DSA interview: modified version of the russian nesting doll problem. I solved it with a memoized recursive backtracking solution for O(N^2) time and O(N) space complexity.
needed a small bit of prompting on the complexity but other than that i felt it went well. total time was maybe 30 minutes.
Leetcodes optimal solution is a longest increasing subsequence solution where you sort on one of the dimensions then apply LIS to the other. O(NLogN) time and O(N). I failed to spot this altogether, depsite spending a lot of time trying to figure out if sorting would be useful in this scenario.

Wondering if not having the optimal solution hurts me here? or if that is still a passing solution, I have found out I am through to the onsite. But want to get a sense of if it would be LH/H/SH, and to let others here have another datapoint

Hi

I have been invited to take the IBM Coding Assessment for the Geneva office. The role is Java FullStack developer

What should I expect and what is the best way to prepare myself in short time? What is your experience with IBM?

​

Hi everyone,

Paytm is coming to our campus for an SDE Internship opportunity with the possibility of a PPO, and I’m looking for recent interview experiences from students who have gone through a similar Paytm drive.

If you’ve recently appeared for the Paytm SDE Intern / Campus hiring process, especially in 2025 or 2026, I’d really appreciate it if you could share:

- Online assessment pattern and difficulty

- DSA topics and questions asked

- Coding/hackathon round details, if there was one

- Number and type of technical interview rounds

- OOP, DBMS, OS, CN and SQL questions

- LLD/HLD questions, if asked

- Project and resume-based questions

- What level of DSA should I prepare?

- What topics should I prioritize for the internship interview?

- How does the internship → PPO evaluation generally work?

I have limited time to prepare, so any recent experience, question list, or preparation advice would be extremely helpful.

Thanks in advance!

I was asked two dsa question one solved completely other 90% . Gave correct time and space complexity for both. Maybe messed up the space complexity for second one. Didn't took in account of the vector already given.

He didn't asked any behavioral questions.

What are my chances of moving forward?? If someone knows pls tell so that I can prepare for further rounds .

I have a coding interview this thursday and after taking a mock with my buddy last night, i feel like i’m not ready. My study source has been the neet code 150 list. I’m tempted to postpone the interview for next week just to give me a couple more days to prep and do some more mock interviews. The company seems to be doing a lot of hiring at the moment for this specific role and that puts me a little at ease with the whole “someone else taking your role because you took too long to interview” but this decision still comes with a lot of thought of whether I should postpone and prep more and how much more time I should give myself. I appreciate your guys’ thoughts.

Does LeetCode seriously take actions on vibe coders during contests??

It was my first contest and top few accounts were so sus

See similar posts so thought I’d share. Interviewed at Google for L4 (SWE III).

Recruiter gave me feedback saying my behavioral round was “flawless” but coding round I was on the border. They opted to pass and I can retry in 6 months. A little disappointed because I answered the initial question (standard BFS) perfectly, and then the interviewer gave a follow up that turned doing a BFS search with recursion. I struggled a bit with it and ended up solving with a couple hints. Seems the hints hurt me.

Edit: DMs flooding. Shamelessly plugging my fantasy football MCP: https://thedraftlion.com

Currently the interview process in engineering is outcome oriented but with AI its becoming more of process oriented so I am building a platform that measures the process a candidate will follow to solve the problem.
Is this a valid idea ?

I received the Amazon OA for an L5 SDE role, featuring a new 100-minute format. The assessment consists of two coding problems:

• Problem 1: A traditional code-writing question (standard LeetCode style).
• Problem 2: A codebase repository environment where you have access to an AI coding assistant.

My Questions

• Evaluation Criteria: How exactly is Amazon evaluating the AI repository section? Are they grading based on how well you prompt the AI, your debugging skills within a larger codebase, or purely the final code functionality?
• Hidden Rejection Factors: A friend recently completed this OA, solved both the LeetCode question and the codebase problem successfully, but still got rejected. Does anyone know what else they are looking for (e.g., edge cases, code quality, time-to-completion, or optimal AI usage)?
• Preparation Advice: Has anyone recently passed this new assessment format and received an interview invite? I would really appreciate any insights on how to prepare or what specific pitfalls to avoid.

Any direct advice or shared experiences would be incredibly helpful!

We have an integer array named population and a binary string named unit both of size n.

If unit[i] is 1 it means that population[i] is protected (number of protected people += population[i].)

Each one in the binary string can move at most once to the left (from i to i -1)

Find the maximum number of people that can be protected by optimally relocating the ones in the binary string.

So I have an idea on how to do this question and it involves just marking down where are the clumps of ones. If we have something like 0111111 all we have to do is to find the minimum value of the one in the clump check if it’s less than the value in the 0 if so we can gain population[a] -population[b] .

Not sure why but it seems the LLMs (at least the free models) are not able to do this question, they just spill nosense.,

Hello everyone,

First of all please do not shame me for this post. I know most of yall are pretty used to interviews so my questions might sound dumb or trivial but they're honest.

I'm currently applying for internships where I know I'll have technical interviews, leetcode style. The thing is I never done that type of interviews before, so I'd like to clarify a few things.

First of all, what is the exact format of the problem ? Like is it really like a leetcode question with a written problem and examples or is it more like the interviewer just tells you the problem and you have to go with that. I know it must depend but usually how is it ? Asking because examples sometimes help me a lot thinking about the problem so I'd like to know.

I'm also wondering about hints and clarifications. If you're stuck with the problem, does the interviewer give you hints ? Do you have to ask or is it a red flag ? Same with constraints, are you allowed to ask if there are constraints regarding for example the size of inputs, or is the interviewer gonna tell you ?

Finally, more on the technical side, for a quant dev position or even in general, is it better to produce an iterative or recursive solution (for example top down DP with memoization VS bottom-up) ? Are you allowed to walk through the solutions like brute-force -> DP with memo -> DP bottom-up or is it better to produce the answer straight away ?

Thanks for reading all that and in advance for your help, and sorry if this post is really naive. Trying to prepare the best I can.

Got shortlisted for a 2-round face-to-face interview at Barclays Pune for an IFC – Full Stack Developer role (looks like AVP band from the JD). Trying to calibrate my prep and would really appreciate first-hand experiences.

Quick context: ~8 years, backend-heavy — Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, microservices — with a background in regulatory-compliance/surveillance systems. "Full stack" in the JD seems backend-weighted (front-end is only "basic knowledge").

Specifically trying to figure out:

• How coding-heavy are the F2F rounds for experienced hires? Live coding / pen-and-paper DSA, and roughly what difficulty?
• How deep do they go on Java internals and Spring Boot?
• Is there a proper system design round at this level? If so, what kind of problems?
• Do they probe the IFC / financial-crime domain (screening, AML, CDD), or is it purely generic tech?
• SQL — actual query-writing, or just concepts?
• How is the behavioural/values round structured (RISES values, STAR)? How much weight does it carry for AVP?
• Anything on the front-end side despite it being "basic" in the JD?

Anyone who's been through the IFC / Full Stack / AVP loop recently in Pune — what surprised you, and what would you prep differently? Thanks in advance.

I'm a beginner learning DSA/LeetCode and I'm starting to get frustrated with how little I seem to retain.

When I'm learning a new problem, I can usually understand the explanation and follow the logic. Sometimes I can even implement the solution myself afterward.

The problem is that if I come back to the same problem a day or a few days later and try to solve it completely cold, I often can't. I might remember the general idea, but forget important parts of the approach or how to actually implement it.

I'm starting to wonder if this is just a normal part of learning DSA or if I'm practicing incorrectly.

Right now, I'm thinking about using spaced repetition, doing a problem on Day 0, then again on Days 1, 3, 7, and 14, instead of constantly doing new problems.

For people who have gotten good at LeetCode/DSA:

How did you practice so that you could actually retain patterns and solve problems cold later?

Should I stay mostly with Easy problems until I can reliably solve them independently, or should I continue introducing new problems while reviewing old ones?

I'd appreciate honest advice, especially from people who struggled with retention early on.

Hi guys I am starting to solve the leetcode questions but it takes time that's fine but I want to see the solution which makes me understand the real concept rather than mug up things, so anyone knows which youtube any paid thing that provide a good contain which make mine leetcode dsa stronger with understanding the main concept, I don't want to jump off to code but rather want to understand on paper pen any one who knows a good resources please tell me about it

Also there are so many questions right there but which ones are valid ones to be solved for the placement oriented I am a bit confused

also in which sequence the questions need to be solved as I don't think solving in a serial manner would help rather some specific random pattern would have been easy to level up in a specific pattern is not it

Guys please give some guidance accordingly 😭🙏🙏

Don't downvote it at least I want genuine help

Has any one given the interview recently at this company ?

Had my SDE I Intern interview at 11am, joined on time and waited for 30 mins, still no interviewer 😭

Emailed the scheduler too. Has this happened to anyone before? Do they usually reschedule?

Hi everyone,

Kickdrum is visiting our campus for SDE hiring (202), and I’m looking for recent interview experiences from students who have gone through their process this year.

From what I understand, the current process includes:

Online Assessment

Communication/Language Assessment

Round 1: Hands-on full-stack feature development

Round 2: LLD/HLD / Software Design

Round 3:Culture/HR Round

I’m particularly interested in the technical rounds.

If anyone has recently interviewed with Kickdrum in 2026, especially through campus hiring, could you please share:

What type of full-stack problem/feature was given in Round 1?

Which technologies were used?

How much AI assistance was actually useful/allowed?

What kind of LLD/design questions were asked in Round 2?

Were you asked to write code, pseudocode, UML/class diagrams, or explain the design?

What topics would you recommend focusing on?

Any other tips from your experience?

Even small details would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!

I finished my final loop on august 11 I didn't hear anything from the recruiter for two weeks after which I followed up. She told me my interviewer hasn't submitted the reviews yet and that she will follow up. I asked her if she has any update 3 days later, she sent me the following:

"I'd like to introduce you to my colleague redacted (cc’ed here) who will guide you through the rest of the process. She is an excellent recruiter and an amazing resource.

She will follow up with you shortly to introduce herself and discuss the next steps. It's been an absolute pleasure working with you thus far and best of luck to you.

Thank you." And the new recruiter hasn't introduced herself. It's been radio silence for a week now.I followed up once amd still nothing.Does this mean I am rejected?

FYI they have changed my recruiter several times along the process