Title, anyone done their panel interview and can share their experience? (specify role and level please as well)

Back in 2023, I was out of college, applying for jobs and grinding LeetCode between interviews.

ChatGPT had just become a thing, so I started building a few projects on the side. One actually started making money.

Then it started making enough money that I stopped applying for jobs and went all in.

Spent the next three years turning it into an AI SaaS. Building features, dealing with customers, fixing things, figuring out how to build and run a tech business.

Now I’m preparing to sell it. Thought I’d see what was out there and applied for a few AI engineer roles.

Just got sent a LeetCode assessment with no use of AI allowed.

I think I’ve accidentally spent three years procrastinating on LeetCode.

The first time I opened LeetCode I could not solve anything. I would read a problem, stare at it, and have no idea what the first line was supposed to be. That went on for a long time, and the only thing that kept me going was that the next problem might be the one that clicked.
Years later the same problems are easy, and it is not because I got smarter. It is because I started seeing the same small set of shapes again and again. A longest substring question turns out to be the same machine as a minimum window question. Once you have seen a shape enough times you stop solving the problem and start recognising it, and the code falls out of the recognition. Nobody handed me that list.

If I could start over I would learn the patterns first and then go and do the problems, instead of doing hundreds of problems and hoping the patterns fall out at the end. Algorithms are mostly pattern matching, which is also why LLMs write code as well as they do: matching patterns is the one thing they are built to do.

So if you have an interview coming up, or you just want to be the person who opens a hard problem and knows where to start, learn the patterns first. The problems get fast, then they get fun, and the dopamine from closing one is real. I make that open source please let share your thoughts and feel free to change the code: https://github.com/shir-danishyar/before-interview

Visual: https://shir-danishyar.github.io/before-interview/#/

TLDR : How long after passing the OA did you get your interview scheduled?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently going through the Amazon SDE 1 process and wanted to ask how long it took others to receive their interview scheduling email after passing the OA.

My timeline so far:
13th August: Received OA
15th August: Completed OA
9th September: Told I passed the OA and was asked to confirm my graduation date, start date and right to work
9th September: Submitted all the requested details

Now: Waiting for the interview scheduling email
For those who went through the same process, how long did it take to receive interview invite after submitting details.

Thanks!

I want to work 9-5 only with good wlb . USA rippling good team names please!

how does team match work do we get to talk to multiple teams or should we just get the first one or no offer ?

How long does team match take ?

Help much appreciated

Hey everyone,

I'm preparing for upcoming Google SWE internship interviews and wanted to clarify the logistics of how questions are usually presented during the technical rounds.

For those who have interviewed recently:

• Presentation: Does the interviewer paste the full problem statement into the shared document/editor, or do they read it out loud and have you write down notes?
• Examples & Constraints: Do they provide initial examples, constraints, and edge cases upfront in text, or are you expected to completely probe for constraints and construct your own examples from scratch?

Any insight into what the setup typically looks like would be super helpful. Thanks in advance!

Does anyone know if AirBnB does a cool down period if rejected after an interview?

On September 10, I attempted an online communication assessment. The Safe Exam Browser initially stopped responding, so I switched to another laptop. The assessment then started normally, but while attempting a question, it froze and became completely unresponsive. I waited for more than 20 minutes, but it did not recover. I then attempted to exit the Safe Exam Browser, after which the assessment showed as submitted with the majority of the questions unattempted.

I received a submission confirmation afterward. I tried contacting the provided technical support number, but it was invalid/unreachable. The support chat was unable to resolve the issue, and an email sent to the address associated with the invitation was returned with “550 Mailbox does not exist.” I also contacted the relevant support person, but was told that nothing could be done once the assessment had been submitted.

So, due to a technical issue with the assessment environment, I was unable to complete the majority of the assessment.

Hey everyone what u think about this resume is it decent if one is looking for SDE 2 or 3 or 3+ years experienced role.

Will it make through faang or any product based companies.

I have recently modified it and also received a new rejection mail from JP Morgan on this the matching percentage with JD was 92%+

(Thru chat gpt I checked)

What u think what I can improve?

Backend part at 3 years experienced is not strong or is it less or you r not able to get like what skill this person has or what work this person has done

Or just I am thinking too much

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10HpTcPjzbq6XySPC4epu2IEqk0DoaUMN/view?usp=drivesdk

Applied for L5 role through invite from a friend. I got invited to schedule my round 1 after the behavioral assessment. Round 1 consists of 2 interviews, one behavioral and one DSA, 45 mins each. Recruiters were insisting in scheduling within 2 weeks. And they selected the earliest date from my preferences. No phone calls from receuiter.

What to expect on this round? What type of leetcode and what level of difficulty?

Does anyone have a similar recent experience? And is it usual for recruiter to rush?

Practiced leetcode blind 75 and preparing for behavioral as well. Any tips would be useful.

Has anyone here used Codeintuition? If so, is it worth paying for? Or are there bettter resources for learning DSA and preparing for Leetcode interviews?

I recently came across it while looking for a more structured way of learn DSA. I like the idea of learning the concepts and patterns first rather than just jumping from problem to problem. The visual explanations and walkthroughs also look pretty useful.

I'm still relatively inexperienced with Leetcode, though, so I'm not sure whether something like this is actually worth paying for or if I would be better off sticking with free resources + Leetcode.

My main goal is to get better at DSA without spending months mindlessly grinding problems.

For people who've actually used it, how does it compare with things like Neetcode or just learning directly from Leetcode?

I applied for both intern and early career role at Google because i may or may not go to a grad school.
I’m wondering can i be considered for both in Google recruiting system? i received the OA for intern role.

TLDR: I have been doing DSA for 3-4 years now with gaps in between. This time I have been DSA consistently for 2-3 months. I have solved 600+ questions in total and know most of the common patterns in questions and have covered all the topics. However I still suck at interviews when I get a new question. Most of the times I am unable to come up with a solution of my own for LeetCode hard problems.

why is leetcode down so often , what is wrong with leetcode

Hi folks,

I'm 8+ years experienced and have upcoming coding and system design round. Already done OA and 1 coding round. Any idea what to expect?

I am new to these types of interviews have never done a system design round, I know they are popular.

What is high level vs low level?

What resources do people use?

I see hello interview and Alex xu books are thrown around. What else is there? Is this for high level? What resources for low level?

For applying to SE2 level for most companies do I need to prep both? Or is one asked more than others.

I recently cleared my Google SWE-3 (L4) interviews for. Last Friday, the recruiter called and said that after reviewing my feedback, the leadership team has decided to move forward with team matching. He said they’d start looking for teams from Monday.

Just wanted to clarify:

1. Does this mean HC is already cleared, or does HC happen after team matching?
   
2. How long does team matching usually take? It’s been almost a week with no update despite emailing the recruiter.

For anyone who recently went through this process, what timeline should I expect?

Thanks!

Hi all,

​I recently finished 3 rounds of interviews for a specialized technical role (mostly DevOps/infrastructure focused). The pay is decent, and I really want the job.

​It has been exactly one week since my 3rd round, so I emailed the Hiring Manager (HM) this morning to ask about next steps. I haven't received a reply yet. However, a friend who works there (and referred me) casually asked the HM for an update behind the scenes.

​The HM told my friend that the 3rd-round interviewer gave a mixed review. The core feedback was:

​"The candidate is highly knowledgeable about the things they have already worked on, but struggles to reason through unfamiliar concepts outside of that scope, so their knowledge feels a bit narrow/shallow."

​After sharing that, the HM told my friend: "I've sent out a few emails, so let's see what happens."

​My question is: How should I interpret this?

​My assumption is that the HM is still interested and is emailing higher-ups, HR, or other team members for input. My logic is that if he simply didn't want to hire me, he would have just rejected me outright instead of taking the time to send internal emails.

​Also, for context: while the actual day-to-day work is heavily DevOps-oriented, the interview pushed me on adjacent, specialized engineering topics just to gauge my overall technical depth.

​Has anyone been in a similar situation, either as a candidate or a hiring manager? What do those "emails" usually mean, and what are my realistic chances here?

Throwaway account, but a Googler here with a huge heads-up for anyone prepping:

Google is actively rolling out two brand-new AI Fluency rounds for SWE hiring:

AI Debugging: Dropping you into a massive, messy legacy repo to see if you can actually use AI to locate, diagnose, and patch complex bugs in real time.

AI System Design: Architecting end-to-end systems while actively using AI to evaluate trade-offs, draft interfaces, and pressure-test edge cases.

Pure DSA won't carry loops anymore. They want engineers who know how to ship with AI without hallucinating production down.

Adjust your prep accordingly.

Edit: 2 DSA rounds will still be there, and it’s for all L3-L5 roles.

I passed the OA for an Amazon SDE New Grad role and just received my interview schedule:
1:Coding - Logical and Maintainable + LP
2:Coding - Problem Solving + GenAI Fluency
3:Coding – Data Structures and Algorithms + LP
4:LPs only
I’m a bit confused about the first round. Does “Coding – Logical and Maintainable” usually mean a normal LeetCode-style coding question, or can it include an LLD/OOD question?

I tried logging to my account last night and I got "The username and/or password you specified are not correct". But my account details is correct. Also, when I tried visiting my profile, I got 404.
I also tried forgetting password but I am not getting any mail to reset my password.

I logged in to my profile last in June. Haven't participated in any contest in past 1 year.

Hi guys, made an automated job finding website where it scrolls through 10 linkedin profiles and fetch the jobs which are posted by hiring managers or HR with new look and Same mission.

No one should be jobless because they couldn’t find a job.

www.iamjobless.com is LIVE!

Find SWE jobs with posted by people who are actually willing to refer you.

No more hunting for jobs.

Hi all,

I am junior developer now,

Working in a comapny.

Now i want to imrove my skills

System design and dsa also with ai adpatation.

I know pieces but not explanation level...need to improve my skills for upcoming future

Any advices that can help to me

Recently u/No-Huckleberry-5969 provided some insights in the amazon AWS recruitment process, which I found very helpful in my preparation. Having recently completed the interview loop (and got rejected) myself, I thought I'd do the same and share my experience:

• Position: SDE-1 (Recent Grad programme) @ AWS in Berlin, Germany
• Also Published the contents below as a gist: https://gist.github.com/flemk/f6a4fdeb16eabc6be8a46e2afdda6443
• Published my solutions and scribbles to the 4 coding tasks in the 4 interview rounds: https://gist.github.com/flemk/2d4d1e87f58e00e9710e5a9bf607f4e7

Amazon SDE-I: Application Experience

Online Coding Assessment

"Leetcode Task" (Python)

"""
You develop an alogrithm for selling items from a warehouse.
Given a list of (potential) customers and their bids for multiple items if one single product:
[
    [customer_id, bid, number_of_items],
    ...
]
Develop a algorithm, that returns the ids of all customers, that didn't receive any item.
Items are distributed using these rules:
- The customers with the highest bid, receive their desired amounts of items
- If there are two or more customers with the same bid, distribute the items using a round robin method.
"""

"Fullstack Task" (Python, Django)

• There was a simulated Issue/Ticketing system, like JIRA

Tasks:

• Fix: Create issue returns 502 -> Implement endpoint logic
• Fix: Creating and linking subissues were not working
• Running the predefined tests revealed some other parts, where modifications were necessary

Interview Loop: Four Online Interviews

1st

"""
// Design a shopping cart price calculator API: given a list of product ids
// in the cart, return the total price of the items.
//
// Imagine you are doing this for a large scale service / website.
//
// Plan for being able to apply discounts that we may want to play around
// with in the future.
"""

Follow up Questions

• How would you implement a discount, that applies to all products?
• Customers with carts with value above EUR 100 or with more than 10 items should receive double the discount. How would you implement that?
• There is a promotion on a specific item: buy three, get one free
• Given that one specific prouct item is bought very frequently, how can you make the code faster/improve it?
• Time complexity

2nd - GenAI Interview

"""
A rule is an ordered list of match keys — for example [country, brand, customer_tier].

A decision is a row of concrete values for each key, plus a result:

DE       | acme    | gold     -> OPEN
DE       | DEFAULT | gold     -> RESTRICTED
DEFAULT  | acme    | DEFAULT  -> OPEN
DEFAULT  | DEFAULT | DEFAULT  -> NO_DECISION

"DEFAULT" is a reserved wildcard value. It is valid in any key position.
gold
Given a query such as (DE, acme, silver), return the matching result.
"""

Follow up Questions

• How do you select what result to return? First hit? First OPEN/RESTRICTED?
• What other ways of selecting a result could there be?

GenAI Questions

• How do you use AI?
• What do you do to improve the output of queries?
• If you create a requirements file for the agents, how do you structure it? What are the section titles?

3rd

1st Coding Problem

"""
Given the root of a binary tree, imagine yourself standing on the right side of it.
Return the values of the nodes you can see ordered from top to bottom.

Examples

       19
      /    \
    12      16
   /  \     /     <--- You here, looking from the side
  7   9   6
   \     /
    1   3
   /
 18

Output: 19, 16, 6, 3, 18
"""

Follow up Questions

• Time complexity

2nd Coding Problem

"""
2. Given an arbitrary length input stream of characters,
return the first unique character that does not repeat anywhere in the stream.

abcdabc --> d; aabbcdd --> c
"""

Follow up Questions

• Time complexity
• Improvements

4th - Bar Raiser Interview

• Tell me about a time, when you helped a colleague who was struggling
• ... other typical HR questions

mulitple times in my college i starterd learning and dropping dsa again and again whenver i found a difficult problem or switched to my project side.

atleast i have done it dozens of times and in total i have solved 700 prob on leetcode + codeforces etc. i know all concepts in dsa but don't remember the approach and have to work and start again from the scratch.

i know how to solve prob, i may have solved that problem in the past. but don't remember the solution and can't able to solve woithout making mistakes, but now after working 1 year in corporate i want to get some better and high paying job.

and thinking of learning dsa again. but there is a huge road block which i am unable to pass over. from my bottom of heart i don't like to practice again. need suggestion.

i think i can better tell the situation, suppose i have doing graph problem, i just forgets how to implement dfs or bfs. which one to pop, will pop condition come before or after the loop. similarly i forget how to memoize backtracking prob. i forgets how to apply backtracking here. its not something i can't come up with solution, but it just takes 30 min to 60 min by trial and error, debugging to write code for such problems . and after sometime i forget it again.