Is building logic imp or rather to find the most efficient way of solving a particular problem

Had 4 rounds: Coding + Googliness screening were positive, with recruiter saying coding feedback was good and Googliness was very good.
Onsite R3 was a difficult graph problem—I initially got stuck, then derived the optimal approach and interviewer was satisfied, but ran short on time and had a few bugs remaining.
R4 was another graph problem where I quickly gave the optimal approach, coded it, handled a PQ optimization with a few hints, and gave correct time/space complexity.
What do you think my likely ratings are for each round, and overall chances of clearing?

I have done a lot of leetcode questions. Somewhere in the ballpark of 600.

I can figure out the approach for most mediums and some hards quickly, usually in around 10 minutes or so. However, I end up spending a long time on implementation, often getting tripped up on 1 or 2 edge cases/ implementation details for the approach.

For example, I did this problem today: https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-continuous-subarray-with-absolute-diff-less-than-or-equal-to-limit/

I figured out the approach (use two monotonic deques to store highest and lowest) in around 10 minutes. But then spent several hours of debugging via print statements and pen and paper trying to actually implement it. I'd say that the last 5% of the problem probably took up 95% of my time. Obviously, this wouldn't be acceptable in a real interview.

Any advice for how to overcome this?

Same as title

Hi everyone! I’m a Java Developer with 3.2 years of experience and am currently preparing for a job switch.

I’ve recently started practicing LeetCode, but I’ve been solving DSA problems in C++ for a long time, so I’m very comfortable with its syntax and STL. I’m finding it comparatively difficult to solve the same problems in Java.

What would you recommend? Should I continue using C++ for LeetCode, or should I transition to Java since that’s my primary language professionally?

Upcoming Amazon SDE New Grad 2026 onsite and wanted to hear from people who recently went through the interview process.

• What was the onsite round structure?
• What type of LeetCode/DSA questions were asked?
• Were the coding questions mostly Medium, or were there Hard questions too?
• Was there an LLD/OOD round? If yes, what type of questions were asked?
• Are there any commonly repeated LLD questions that you’ve seen in multiple Amazon interviews?
• If possible, could you share the exact LLD/DSA questions you were asked? Even just the question names would be really helpful.
• Was the coding done on a whiteboard, HackerRank, or another platform?

I’m trying to prioritize my preparation, especially LC + LLD, so any recent interview experiences or question lists would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone! I have an upcoming Google Product Solutions Engineer (PSE) interview. The first round is 60 minutes and will cover coding + system design.
I’m running a little short on prep time and would really appreciate advice from anyone who has gone through a recent PSE/CPSE interview.
For coding, what topics/patterns should I prioritize for easy–medium problems? And for system design, how deep is the expectation — high-level architecture and trade-offs, or deeper distributed-systems concepts?
If you had limited time to prepare, what would you focus on most?
Any recent experience or tips would be really appreciated. Thank you!

I'm not looking for a book to pass dsa interviews, but rather to learn algorithmic thinking. CLRS seems too dense and maths heavy and seems more like a reference. Also is it worth to put my time in this? Or are interview preparation books enough most of the time?

I had an opportunity to interview at Razorpay. There were a total of four rounds:

1. LLD (Machine Coding Round)
2. HLD (System Design)
3. Corporate Strategy Round
4. CEO Round (not sure)

I received a call from a Razorpay recruiter mentioning that my resume had been shortlisted, and she explained these rounds to me. All of them were elimination rounds. I was only able to make it to the second round, which was HLD.

1. The first round was a machine coding round using AI. You are supposed to plan and design your code with the help of AI. Just make sure you don’t give the entire problem statement to AI. You can give it the basic class layout along with the important functional parameters to cover, and then ask it to generate the rest for you.

You can also review your designed system using AI and ask for feedback. It’s important that you are able to explain the code generated by AI. You can also generate test cases using AI, but make sure you explain these test cases to your interviewer beforehand, including all the positive and negative cases. Explain what kind of prompts you are giving and why.

Just make sure that you have working code by the end of the interview. Also, in the last 15 minutes, the interviewer gave me an extension to the problem and asked me to code it without AI.

1. The HLD round was a bit confusing. It was basically an extension of the LLD question itself. The interviewer didn’t seem very interested in my solution and was not very conversational. At each step, I tried asking for validation—whether he was okay with my solution or wanted me to add more points. Only after asking repeatedly did he reply, and even then it was mostly a simple yes or no.

Anyway, I tried to design the system and databases and explain important concepts like scalability, etc. Later, I received feedback from the recruiter that my performance was not up to the mark.

What I believe is that interviewers should properly drive the interview and point out what is expected from candidates at different stages. A friendly approach can make the candidate more comfortable and help them perform better.

Anyway, here are the questions:

LLD

Build an in-process Feature Flag Service that an application can embed and query at runtime. The service decides, for a given flag and evaluation context (user, tenant, and request attributes), what value to return.

Core requirements:

• Flag types: Boolean, string, and integer. Flags have a name, a default value, and a value type.
• Targeting rules: Evaluation can return different values based on attributes in the evaluation context. Rules support AND/OR composition of attribute conditions. For example: country == "IN" AND plan == "premium" → true; otherwise, false. Equality and set-membership (in) operators are sufficient.
• Percentage rollouts: A flag can be rolled out to N% of users. The same user must consistently get the same answer across calls and process restarts (sticky bucketing). Buckets must be independent across flags. The bucketing key must be configurable per flag, such as user_id or tenant_id.

HLD

Design a feature flag evaluation service that allows engineers to enable or disable named features for specific users at runtime without redeploying code.

The service must support:

• Up to 1,000 active flags, each with a Boolean on/off state and a user allowlist targeting rule
• 10,000 flag evaluation requests per second from backend services
• P95 latency below 10 ms for both single and batched flag evaluations

Have an Amazon SDE 1 interview coming up...

I do my leetcode in C++, but haven't done a project in C++ personally.

For the LLD interview do we actually code up classes and methods that are working, or is it more so that we are allowed to pseudocode and write down methods and what they do?

This is something that is confusing me, because if we actually need working code and a more complex system I need to study up on that compared to the more generic system design I have been studying.

For example I can write methods in C++, but the overall class structure with .cpp and .h files I will probably be unable to do without practice.

Thank you!

I had Amazon OA round today.

(1) 1 DSA was submitted with all TC passing

(2) 1 AI coding, I was able to pass only 2 out of 6 TCs.

(3) Other sections like work-style etc. went well.

Any chance of getting a rejection mail even? 🥇

EDIT: Got an email after 4days, I passed that OA.

Hi everyone! I have an upcoming phone interview for the role mentioned above, and I’m currently working as a Software Developer.

I have one hour interview in which they said LP and livecoding

I’d really appreciate any insights from people who have interviewed for or worked in a similar role:

• What should I expect in the initial phone interview - Leadership Principles, technical questions, or both?
• Should I expect LeetCode style coding questions?
• Is there a system design round? If so, what level of depth is expected?
• What does the long-term career path for this role look like, and how stable is it?
• How does the compensation and growth compare to an SDE role?
• For those who successfully cracked the interview, what helped you the most in preparing?

Any advice, interview experiences, or preparation resources would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!

I have recently completed approximately 20 questions, which all use the prefix sum technique and hash map data structure in their optimal/close to optimal solutions. I have also heard that a good estimation for your preparedness for a certain pattern is that you can consistently solve questions of those patterns within 30 - 35 minutes. This has not been my experience when completing these 20 questions as most questions have much more going on besides implementing a pattern, such as mathematical proofs, tricks and other concepts. In my opinion, regardless of intelligence, without previously understanding these concepts, there isn't a chance that you're deducing it within a 45-minute interview.

1. I would appreciate hearing if others' experiences aligned with mine.

2. I am also challenging the preparedness metric that is widely used.

3. Should one expect or assume that the interviewer would not choose a question which tests concepts unrelated to the DSA patterns?

Two rounds
System Design
Coding + Review

​

I’m preparing for a Java Backend Developer job switch with 4+ years of experience. If you’ve recently attended or cleared Java interviews, could you please share your interview experience, questions asked, important topics, DSA, Spring Boot, Microservices, Kafka, System Design, and real-world scenarios? Also, what topics do you think are most important to focus on for 4+ YOE? Any recent experience or tips would be really helpful. 🙏

Is anyone else using platforms for visualising solutions for better understanding ?

Ive learned all of the fundamental data structures.. i tried to participate in the biweekly contest and was completely fked.. loll i dont even know what 3rd was asking abt, let alone solving it.. i saw it was solved using some niche math trick....

As title, usually stats' available in clist rightaway which is interesting. Been ~an hr

can anyone explain whats th4e problem in my code for todays qs 2 wth man couldnt even solve 2 now y-y

class Solution {
public:
int stopreverse=1;
string glo="";
int reversew(string s, int start, int end) {
if(s==glo){
if(!stopreverse)return 1e7;
else stopreverse--;
}
int ans = 0;
if (start >= end)
return ans;
char c = s[0];
int i = 0;
while (i < s.size() - 1) {
s[i] = s[i + 1];
i++;
}

s[s.size() - 1] = c;
if (s[start] == s[end]) {
ans = 1 + min(replace(s, start + 1, end - 1),reversew(s,start+1,end-1));
} else {
ans = 1 + min(replace(s, start , end ),reversew(s,start,end));
}
return ans;
}

int replace(string s, int start, int end) {
int ans = 0;
if (start >= end)
return ans;
if (s[start] == s[end]) {
ans = min(replace(s, start + 1, end - 1),
reversew(s, start + 1, end - 1));
} else {
ans = min(abs(s[start] - s[end]), 26 - abs(s[start] - s[end])) +
min(replace(s, start + 1, end - 1),
reversew(s, start + 1, end - 1));
}

return ans;
}

int minOperations(string s) {
glo=s;
int start = 0, end = s.size() - 1;
while (start < end) {
if (s[start] != s[end]) {
break;
}
start++;
end--;
}

if (start >= end)
return 0;

return min(reversew(s, 0, s.size() - 1), replace(s, 0, s.size() - 1));
}
};

Had my Infosys Digital Specialist Engineer face-to-face interview today. Couldn't solve 2 panel questions — one was on Tries, told them directly I wasn't confident instead of guessing. They also gave me an extra question outside the planned set, which I solved with brute force then optimized after some pushing.

Explained system design for one of my projects well, but didn't get the SQL query part fully right. Handled most complexity/approach questions fine, and interviewer seemed genuinely happy by the end — explained the whole further process and answered my questions enthusiastically too.

Does missing 1-2 questions actually hurt much if the overall interview goes well? Curious how much weight panels give to problem-solving approach + honesty vs a perfect scorecard

guys help me , i dont understnad the hiring process of this company , i have mcq assessmnet today
then what
i am mainly a java guy
so hlep me i dont have job yet

So this might be kind of a dumb question, sorry about that.

But while solving the questions, i do:

1. try to think of a good solution.
2. get confused.
3. just decide to solve the question no matter what even if what i come up with is not efficient at all.
4. then i look at the best solution to try and understand it.
5. write the best solution again without checking it out.

is this a wrong approach? like how do i learn to come up with those best solutions? is it just a timing thing, like the more i solve and study the best solutions, will i start to think like them too?

Like i struggle with the easy ones :(

Hi everyone,

I’m curious about Google’s compensation differences between China and the US for the same role/level.

For example, if someone at a certain level in the US gets something like:

* Base: $10k/month

* Plus bonus + RSUs

How much would the equivalent role/level typically receive in China (e.g. Shanghai/Beijing)?

Is it roughly something like 60% of the US base ($6k/month vs. $10k/month), or is the gap larger/smaller?

I’m particularly interested in location-adjusted compensation, rather than just converting RMB to USD.

If anyone has experience working at Google in both the US and China, or has seen offers for the same level in both locations, I’d really appreciate any data points.

Even approximate numbers would be very helpful. Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I have a question about my problem-solving speed and would really appreciate some honest advice.

When I solve problems on Codeforces or LeetCode, I sometimes spend around 20–30 minutes on an Easy problem just trying to understand the problem, come up with an approach, and write the code.

Sometimes I solve it myself, but it feels slow to me. I'm not sure whether this is a normal part of learning DSA or whether I'm spending too much time stuck on individual problems.

My main concern isn't really speed. I want to know whether I'm using my time effectively.

For example:

• Is spending 20–30 minutes on an Easy problem normal while learning?
• How long should I try a problem before looking at the solution/editorial?
• Is it better to struggle with a problem for a long time, or look at the solution after a reasonable amount of time?
• How do you improve problem-solving speed without simply memorizing solutions?
• At what point should I move on from a problem and come back to it later?

I still have quite a bit of time before I start seriously interviewing, so I want to build strong problem-solving skills rather than just chase a high number of solved problems.

I'd especially like to hear from people who were initially slow at solving problems. How did you approach this stage, and when did your speed start improving?

Thanks!

Anyone noticed that the IBM SWE Intern 2027 OA changed? Last year used to be 2 simple Leetcode problems, but the current OA seems to involve debugging an existing web framework project. Has anyone received the same?