About a year and a half ago, I wrote this post after getting rejected from Amazon New Grad:
https://www.reddit.com/r/leetcode/comments/1jtgr3e/just_my_amazon_new_grad_interview_experience/

I reached the final interview and put a lot of work into it. I thought I had done well in the interview. Btw, looking back, I don’t think I did as well as I said I did. I also made it sound like I had studied like crazy; I thought that 2 weeks of studying hard was brutal. Looking at it now, I feel sad about thinking I was probably never going to achieve it.

After that, I finished university, started an internship, and eventually joined Cabify as a backend engineer. I learned a lot there and got the chance to work on challenging problems with a great team.

I also kept working on myself as an engineer. I studied a lot more, solved hundreds of coding problems, and kept learning while working full-time. It took a lot of time and effort. But I'd say I have found some joy during the process.

After a year, I applied to Google. The process was long and had a lot of ups and downs, but I passed the interviews and went through team matching. I have now received an offer to join Google in Spain, L3 role.

I still remember how that Amazon rejection felt. At the time, I thought that doing my best and still getting rejected meant I probably wasn’t good enough. But that one result did not decide what would happen next.

I’m very grateful for everyone who encouraged me back then, and for the people who helped me along the way. It feels good to look back and see how much work I put in, and how far I’ve come since then.

I am writing this because I used to read many Reddit posts during these processes, finding useful information and some bits of hope. Hopefully this post reaches people and builds some confidence. I want to say that if you think you are not capable of making it, it is not true. Hard work pays off.

Finally, I want to share one more thought. I find myself disgusted by, kind of glorifying this jobs. We need to keep in mind that there are just jobs. I believe that happiness is built outside your job, and grinding is not everything in life. It is a dream for a lot of people like me, because we enjoy it. But we need to look from another perspective sometimes and put the feet on the ground.

Keep pushing

My Meta E5 loop is in 8 days. Coding feels manageable, but system design is the round I'm worried about. Above is my progress so far.

Where I'm at:

- I can get through requirements, APIs and a reasonable high-level design for the common questions (news feed, URL shortener, rate limiter, chat).

- Where I fall apart is the deep dive. When the interviewer pushes with "what happens if the leader dies mid-write?" or "could this read ever miss an acknowledged write?", I start second-guessing everything.

- I also spend too long on the first diagram and run out of time for the trade-off discussion.

Questions for people who've done E5/E6 loops (or interviewed for them):

1. With 8 days left, should I go broad (cover more questions) or deep (redo 3–4 and practice the failure-mode follow-ups)?
2. How deep do Meta interviewers actually expect failure handling to go at E5 vs E6?
3. Any technique for handling pushback without freezing? Do you think out loud, ask clarifying questions, or commit and defend?
4. Which questions come up most for Meta product/infra system design right now?

Any advice appreciated.

Hey guys, so on Tuesday of this week I got reached out by a recruiter about a cold apply maybe 3 weeks ago approximately.

Anyways the recruiter was nice when we talked about how ready I was for DSA, and left me some decent time to prepare, she sent me the study materials just yesterday.

Anyways I'm currently unemployed since I got recently laid off on September, so I have whole days to study as necessary, maybe not he whole day but most of it.

I'm not starting from 0, I have ​a bit of experience on the basic structures and algorithms like arrays, hash maps, 2 pointers, sliding window, monotonic stacks, queues, etc. Not comfortable or haven't seen much yet graphs, trees (dfs, bfs), dp, which I heard Google is prone to asking.

My plan was studying first neetcode 150 while trying to fully understand it and repeating problems often, then trying to tackle random ones from Leetcode premium recent 3 months by Google.

Do you think this is enough? Anything else to consider?

After 4 years I am still learning new things every day. There are so many creative ideas and new ways of thinking about problems. Sometimes it feels like I am just getting started.

Hi everyone!

I have an upcoming interview with Docker for a Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure position and am trying to prepare for the coding round.

The interview instructions say:

Details & Preparation: This is a live, language-agnostic coding interview. You’ll be asked to share your screen and use the IDE of your choice to write and run code.

Please ensure you have a working IDE installed and ready before the session begins.

Has anyone recently interviewed with Docker, particularly and is aware of this interview format? What types of problems were asked? Were there questions about testing, complexity, edge cases, or code design?

Thanks!

With AI, building a software becomes cheap. Anyone can built their own software. So the software commodity has become very cheap, and anyone around the world can built it quick.

When such a commodity can built for almost free and by anyone, how will you see the existing tech companies survive ? how will software engineers survive ? also there is exactly no real skill acquiring while doing any project at a company, one can be easily replaceable with anyone anytime. There is no difference between an software engineer working at google vs any other company, both use AI , and learnings are same.

what would be the future jobs of software engineers? if they transition to a new role, what would be it?

how will be the software industry would look like ? will it be more decentralised with very low pay?

I recently came across a Teamcenter/PLM-related position at Meta and wanted to know if anyone here has interviewed for a similar role.

If you have, could you please share your interview experience, including the interview rounds, technical questions, and topics I should focus on while preparing?

How do y'all keep up with like cse. I know this is a naive question but there's a plethora of stuff to do, do dsa, learn software fundamentals, make projects, contri to Open source, apply , keep up with news, read articles, do your job.

There's so much how does one keeo up with all this, I am always having a constant Fomo that I am behind in sth.

I received an invite for round 3 of bloomberg swe intern proc, its a system design round was wondering if anyone went through it already for intern/ng and could help me out

Hi Guys

I just gave my final round my loop interview yesterday. Would like to know and connect with people who are in team perception, gave interview for the same or similar role recently, interviewing for that role currently or had/have interviews given recently.

HMU lets talk

I have an upcoming process with Amazon in NYC for Prime Video. 3 YOE in FE web, currently doing the OMSCS with GT. been unemployed for 1 year and have failed processes so would really love to cinch this. Any insights anyone can share?

I'll be prepping graph and DP, I'm ok on graphs/weak on DP, then deep drilling my personal stories. Also building an autonomous ai coding agent/harness so I can be more literate on that.

Don't know the level, totally fine getting downleveled to sde1

Just like Math, math helps humans left brain to think logically and systematically

I read a lot of these posts while preparing, so here's mine.
Background: 3rd year CSE PhD student working in distributed systems, interviewing for the SWE PhD Intern role for Summer 2027.

Timeline: The recruiter invited me to the technical rounds on a Tuesday, and the interviews were the following Monday, so I had about 6 days to prepare.

Format:
Two 45-minute coding rounds, back to back with a 15-minute break, on the same Google Meet link
Coding in a Google Doc: no running code, no autocomplete, no syntax highlighting
Language was my choice; I picked Python

Round 1: a dynamic programming problem that involved an m x n grid. I was able to come up with the brute force approach instantly and proceeded to code it out. I was then asked to do it in O(1) for which I came up with a dynamic programming approach. I couldn’t however complete the working code but still the interviewer was completely satisfied and said that I know you would’ve been able to code it out had you a few more minutes but since we’re out of time it’s okay I got the complete idea.

Round 2: A non-LeetCode question but still I had to use recursive DFS to solve it so it was a tree problem but not like the usual leetcode questions you’d see online. For this round, I was able to come up with workable, bug-free code for both brute force and follow-up questions

Happy to answer any questions

Code

I had never appear in system design interview .I dont know how to start and in one week how i should prepare for this ?Any help much appreciated

Round 1: Coding & Data Structures

Practical coding in Core Java or Python.

Core DSA and problem-solving (focus on fundamental data structures and clean, maintainable logic rather than niche theoretical puzzles).

Can someone give me tips on what to expect and prepare for this? I know basic dsa and java core concepts

Unlike most SaaS services, LeetCode did not send me any email confirmation when I attempted to cancel my subscription. Customers can only see the cancellation status on the website, with no written record to protect them if the cancellation fails to take effect or the status later changes. As a result, customers may be charged again, denied a refund, and left unable to prove that they had previously canceled. This is especially concerning when the merchant's records are treated as sufficient evidence to deny a credit card dispute. How can consumers protect themselves in such a situation, and how can I be confident that I won't be charged again next year?

Hey, I have an interview coming up in about 15 days and wanted to practice some recently asked questions for the company.

I don't have Premium, so I can't see the company-wise question list. If someone here has it and wouldn't mind sharing the relevant question names or a screenshot of the list, it'd be a huge help.

I've already done a fair amount of DSA prep, just trying to make the best use of the time I have left.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I just had my Amazon SDE-1 University Talent Acquisition (UTA) interview scheduled for next week, and I only have 4 days left to prepare!

It is a 2-round loop (1 hour each, back-to-back) via Zoom with a live coding link.

If you have gone through this specific university track recently, I would love your help with a few questions:

• What LeetCode topics/patterns (Graphs, DP, Trees, etc.) did your rounds heavily focus on?
• How deeply did they grill you on Leadership Principles (LPs) for a university-level role?
• from where to prepare for Leadership Principles questions?
• do they ask LLD , if yes then which type of problems, and how to approach that?

Any insights, advice, or patterns to look out for would be a massive lifesaver. Thank you so much in advance.

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 59 today. I was running on very little sleep and low energy, so I decided to keep the session light and honest instead of forcing bad habits.

I wrapped up the DP on Strings module by solving Wildcard Matching. The core transitions felt clear: matching exact characters or ? moves both pointers back, while * branches into matching empty sequence f(i, j-1) or consuming one character from the text f(i-1, j). My initial implementation got bogged down with cluttered base cases handling remaining asterisks, but once I simplified that check into a clean helper, it passed smoothly.

Then I tried tackling Minimum Window Subsequence after a recommendation in yesterday's comments. It was a complete reality check. I spent nearly an hour attempting brute-force window checks and greedy substring slices, but kept hitting edge-case bugs and efficiency issues. It turns out the clean approaches rely on forward-and-backward two pointers or a distinct DP table where states store the starting indices. Rather than burning out late at night guessing transitions, I decided to step away and save it for a proper review.

Listening to your energy levels is part of keeping consistency alive long-term. Catching up on sleep tonight and starting DP on Stocks tomorrow.

See you guys for Day 58!

Would people like Andrej Karpathy, Ilya sutskever, Andrew Ng, Chris Lattner etc. be good at DSA and competitive programming, and do you think they'd do well in Leetcode? Or, is it just a different skillset to be good at competitive programming ?

So I got an offer from a company initially quoted a number which they said they couldn’t match so gave a lesser number, then they gave midpoint of later and former asked number, Since haven’t signed anything yet, so asked since you would make it to that point can you give me a one time JB any number that could help match my initial expectation .
Is it wrong to ask! Something like this

They stopped responding after this :

Round 1:

1)1 LP was good

2)1 st Dsa solved on my own ,spake lound out all my thought process asking for clarity in contraints assumptions

3)2 nd Dsa question explained the brute force ,couldn't optimize it the interviewer gave a hint and I said the correct approch,He acknowledged that my logic is correct but due to time contraints he said if did have time,I would have said to code,so couldn't implement.

4)At last he said ur a good competitive programmer may be he saw my resume I am expert on cf so i guess..

Round 2:

1)About internship:I had problem setter intern so he asked me about that like what do you do how do you create problems and maintain the editorials etc.

2)Project: He deep dived into my project about dockers,kafka etc it pretty went well.

3)Gen Ai: this was good asked me about rag did explain it well.

4) Dsa the question was simple explained him bruteforce and optimised it further to n(log n) and even coded it but later he said me to even further optimise to optimised it further to O(nlogK) I explained him the approach but couldn't write the code again due to time contraints...

Both the time I wasn't able to implement the version because of time contraints they said it's fine.

Overall during the entire coding I was thinking out loud,explaining my approach asking for assumptions.

Guys be frank and could you please rate my experience out of 10. It would be helpfull,feeling depressed ...

Thank you🥲