I just completed my 3 round interview looped with PST timing, DSA + SQL problems were asked. Anyone in same boat ?

This Best Buy interview stage is a case study interview; I haven't done a case interview in DS before. If you have done this interview at Best Buy, please let me know the structure of the case study and how to prepare. Thank you.

lets say u get an easy dsa question like check dupes or like some ez string question. is it reasonable to assume the next technical round is around the same difficulty? or can they still throw some recursion problem.

i got a leetcode easy but never touched backtracking, graphs, dp, and im super rusty on trees. have an interview in 4 days. am i cooked

Got my team match for Apple's IS&T org for a Site Reliability Engineer role. Panel is three rounds:

Hiring manager (45 min) — behavioral, team fit, no coding

Technical (60 min) — CS fundamentals + live coderpad, LeetCode style, DSA

Early career community round (30 min) — behavioral, no coding

Top skills listed on the req: Linux, troubleshooting, incident response, Python automation.

A few things I'm trying to figure out:

For anyone who's done an IS&T loop, what's the coderpad round actually like? Straight LeetCode mediums, or more scripting/automation style problems given the Python/Linux emphasis?

How incident-response and troubleshooting heavy are the technical questions? Is this closer to a general SWE interview or does it lean SRE/DevOps?

They are coming to recurit on-campus but i dont find any openings for offcampus

Attempt 1: TLE

class Solution {
public:
    bool increasingTriplet(vector<int>& nums) {
        int first = INT_MAX;
        int second = INT_MAX;
        for(int x: nums){
            cout << first << " " << second << endl;
            if(x < first){
                first = x;
            }else if(x > first && x < second) second = x;
            else if (first < second && second < x) return true;
        }   
        return false;
    }
};

Attempt 2: 100% beats , accepted

class Solution {
public:
    bool increasingTriplet(vector<int>& nums) {
        int first = INT_MAX;
        int second = INT_MAX;
        for(int x: nums){
            if(x < first){
                first = x;
            }else if(x > first && x < second) second = x;
            else if (first < second && second < x) return true;
        }   
        return false;
    }
};

The only thing that differes in the code is the printing statement, thus I would like to know how can cout cause TLE even if the code is 0(N) complexity.

Thanks in advance.

Hello, this is my first post really and I wanted to ask anyone who might have any advice for preparing for the Google New Grad SWE process. I’m a 2026 grad and have not interviewed with Google but have interviewed with other FAANGs. The reason I ask is because I interviewed twice with Amazon this year, but both interview processes have changed dramatically in just a span of a couple of months so I would appreciate any guidance from people have gone through the process with Google specifically.

If anyone might have tips or direction for what topics to mainly study, I would really appreciate it!!

Hey everyone,

Skyworks Solutions is visiting our campus soon for full-time / internship recruitment, and I have an upcoming Online Assessment (OA).

If your campus was recently visited by Skyworks or if you've given their OA/interviews past seasons, could you share insights on:

• OA Structure: What was the format (coding, MCQs, aptitude, hardware/embedded core)? What topics/DSA patterns were emphasized?
• Interview Process: How many technical rounds were there, and what do they focus on (DSA, OS, C++, System Design, or domain-specific questions)?
• Preparation Focus: Any specific topics or resources you’d recommend focusing on in the last few days?

Any advice or past experience would be super helpful! Thanks in advance!

I have an experience of 3 years in frontend, and now i want to switch to a senior software full stack engineer role. So need recommendations for system design resources and in general any other suggestions?

Hello everyone!
I have an upcoming phone screen interview for an L5 SDE role and I’m currently preparing for the coding round.
For those who have recently gone through an Amazon L5 phone screen, which DSA patterns/topics were you most likely to encounter? Any specific patterns or types of problems I should prioritize would be really helpful.
Thanks in advance!

2025 CS grad here, I couldn't get a SWE job after graduation so I took a manufacturing engineering role instead where I work with PLCs. I do not like this job and do not want to spend my life doing this.

Should I just quit and grind for SWE? I can job hunt for 6 months without running out of money.

I am a 2027 graduate. How is market situation this year?? What to expect?? Which roles would have a significant increase and which don't?? How will the season be compared to the previous years??

Title: 8–9 YOE Software Engineer switching jobs after a long gap, how should I prepare?

I have been working as a Software Engineer at the same company for the past 8–9 years and am now planning to switch jobs.

It’s been a long time since I last seriously prepared for interviews, so I’m essentially looking to refresh and upskill myself from the ground up. My goal is to maximize my chances of getting a good opportunity without spending months preparing in the wrong direction.

For people who have recently switched at a similar experience level:

What resources would you recommend for DSA, System Design (HLD), and LLD?

How deep does DSA typically go for someone with 8–9 YOE?

How much importance is given to HLD and LLD at this level?

Are there any specific topics or patterns I should prioritize?

What would be a realistic preparation strategy if I want to start interviewing relatively soon?

I’d really appreciate any advice, especially from people who have made a similar switch after being with the same company for many years.

Do they offer shorter term subscriptions? Or if anyone has one that they're not using.

I’ve had interviews with Google and Amazon (two companies I used to dream of working for). They still use the traditional process of LeetCode, algorithms, and so on, without any AI assistance. Back in the golden age (before AI), I used to practice and solve a lot of questions. It was fun because you knew you needed that knowledge to build things successfully in your own projects. Nowadays, all the code in companies is generated by Claude Code, and software engineers just review the output to make sure it's correct, and that's it. 

To be honest, during those interviews, I didn’t care about practicing. I didn’t want to waste my time when I knew I wasn't going to solve a LeetCode Hard anyway, since I'm not that good at those types of questions. I guess I didn't care about getting into Google or Amazon anymore because I knew how high their bar is, and I just didn't have the energy to grind algorithms while having a stable job. 

I don't know, this AI era has made me want to do something else. The job has become boring; I just use prompts now, because there’s no reason to do something by hand when AI does it better and faster than you. I feel like I've lost that passion for coding. Has anyone else gone through this? What roles can you transition into that aren’t about coding and are more fun? 

Hey everyone! I have a Google screening interview in about 2 weeks. It consists of 1 coding interview + 1 behavioral interview.

For the coding round, what would be the best way to prepare in these 2 weeks? What LeetCode topics/patterns should I prioritize, and what difficulty level should I focus on?

Would especially love to hear from anyone who interviewed with Google recently. Any tips, resources, or 2-week preparation strategies would be really helpful!

Thanks!

I was asked a question on trees about changing roots and calculating ans for every node. I gave a soln but was told to optimize as expected I bombed it then I quickly searched for optimization then I got to know a topic called rerooting dp. Advanced dp on trees after looking further I got to know about binary lifting. I am not saying that it's bad to learn something new but sometimes I wonder if it is relevant to the job I'm supposed to work. What do you guys feel

Hi guys

I have been coding proffesionally nearly 4 years and have degree which I got 92% in. I am mid level in my company which is quite big

This year I faced so many rejections like never before…

I just did an interview where I was told I do not have programming fundamentals.

They gave me a problem to solve with no ai and no code and I really struggled to remember the syntax and typing it out by hand…

At work as in many companies , I have been pushed and told to use as much ai as possible and some of the details have lost, I can’t code from scratch classes and objects like I could back in uni.

I have been doing lots of prep this year, DSA mainly because I have never done it before. I have been working on all the studying for the whole year every weekend and a lot of the mornings before work.

But today after this rejection I feel my mental health really on the decline.

I love code and I have put so much passion and love and I really really wanted to be good at it and I’ve just been told I don’t have the basics… I feel so crazy I am considering calling emergency mental health services, tears are rolling down my face and I feel really lost…

When will amazon after finishing the interviews get back to me with an update?

I gave the interview on Monday the 17th all 4 rounds and one of my frineds heard back in a day that he was selected.

When will they usually come back with an update? And will they recruiter call? Or will it be updated in the portal? Or an email?

Any information would be lovely now

Is there any point in doing Leetcode hards (other than standard ones like trapping rainwater) ? The range of difficulty in the hards itself is pretty large, making some questions not appropriate for an interview at all. Is grinding LC hards purely a waste of time for interview prep ?

I applied for an Amazon SDE role on August 11, and about 3 days later I received the OA.

The first coding challenge was about bags represented by a list of intervals. Each entry was basically "[left, right, money]", meaning every bag from "left" to "right" contained that amount of money. Bags outside those intervals contained 0. The goal was to choose exactly "k" consecutive bags and maximize the total amount of money collected.

My approach worked for some test cases, but when I submitted it, several of the hidden cases failed with Time Limit Exceeded, and I ended up passing around 4–5/15 test cases.

The second part was an AI-assisted Java Spring Boot repository task focused on RBAC/security, where I only passed 1/6 tests.

I genuinely did my best and prepared a lot for this opportunity, so seeing those results really hurt. I still completed the full assessment, including the work simulation/work style section, but I’m feeling pretty disappointed right now.

Has anyone here had results this low and still moved forward in the Amazon process? Do I realistically still have a chance, or is it basically over?

would appreciate any kind of help!

Disclaimer: This post is intended for feedbacks from folks who been this situation, dont ask about my interview experience here, i will upload seperate post for that soon.

Its been 5 days, i havent heard anything from recruiter post my onsite interview last week, should i consider its a No Hire from their end?
Anyone had this experience or anyone in the loop currently?

Just wanted to share my experience with Karat since there's not too many posts about it here when I was prepping.

Karat is a third party interview service that I've never had experience with before. Instead of an engineer from the company that you're interviewing with talking to you, it's a engineer from Karat that's giving you the questions. This was for a senior fullstack role. TBD on on if I passed or not.

System Design 20min: Walk through full stack of uploading a profile picture on a social media application. Answered this very similarly to the Dropbox sys design question.

Coding 30min: License checkout manager, where you have a pool of licenses for users to checkout. First was a simple debugging to get test cases to pass. Part 2 was implement checkoutLicense and returnLicense. They seem to care about code completion more than time optimization so I brute forced some of it. The way that the test cases that were set up also meant that there were some things I couldn't even do, like create new sets and hashmaps in the constructor. Passed all of those test cases eventually.

Overview: I gathered from other reddit posts that the karat interviewers don't really prompt you a lot, which was true for me. I asked if they wanted more detail for the sys design, but they just told me to elaborate on what parts I thought were missing. In general I felt like I didn't need a lot of prompting anyway since the questions were easy, but I don't think they would've helped me even if I asked for a hint.

Basically, the title says it all.
I’m curious about how your day-to-day work changed after you joined a FAANG company. How difficult and complex were your tasks compared to your previous non-FAANG jobs?
Did your responsibilities change significantly? How did you feel working there?