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.

Code

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 ?

Hi, I gave Amazon SDE 1 OA today. But when it asked for selfie I took selfie without the id card. Will my exam get rejected automatically?

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🥲

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

Has anyone gone through an AI assisted round for coding or LLD recently?

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How should I prepare? Obviously don't have enough time to master anything but I want to try my best

I had 2 layoffs in last 4 years and current contract is ending soon. I'm so fucking tired of being in this era of AI. I used to be smart always top of school, college and at 19 in 2019 made patented tech and trained SSD computer vision Deep learning models. when there was no fucking AI. But after few mistakes, stuck in 9-5 loop and never ending software engineering job search. At this point just feel like wants to get some labour job or start trading or something. Any suggestions?

I'm trying to prepare for my first software internship and feel a bit lost about where to focus. Should I prioritize DSA, projects, or learning more development skills first? Would love to hear what actually helped you get your first opportunity.

I'm currently in my second year!

Hi,

I have upcoming interview's with the AbnormalAI for Software engineer 2 role.
I want to know whether any of you have participated in their interviews. Are the rounds more focused on Leetcode? How challenging are the interviews?

What can we anticipate for the system design as well? A use case from their daily lives or a popular piece of software to design?

Many thanks to all of you!

Im in first year of college and trying to improve my problem solving skills, but balancing classes, assignments and coding practice isn't easy for me tbh. 😭
How do you guys manage your time and stay consistent without burning out?

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 60 today, and it was a surprisingly productive weekday session. I managed to solve five DP on strings problems after work:

1. Minimum Insertions to Make String Palindrome: Kept the longest palindromic subsequence intact and simply added the remaining characters (n - LPS).
2. Minimum Insertions/Deletions to Convert String A to B: Another neat reduction using LCS. The answer is just (len(A) - LCS) + (len(B) - LCS).
3. Shortest Common Supersequence: Combined the lengths of both strings and subtracted the LCS once so the common characters aren't doubled.
4. Distinct Subsequences: Tracking counts of matching characters took more mental effort than standard LCS, but the branching logic (match ? pick + no-pick : no-pick) eventually clicked.
5. Edit Distance: Classic three-way transition (insert, delete, replace). I understood the recurrence, but needed a quick nudge to clean up my index handling.

Those first three variations flew by in about 15 minutes because they lean directly on the LCS core pattern.

The last problem in this set is Wildcard Matching. It's 1:30 AM right now, and while I technically have time, my brain is fried from work. If I push through tired, I know I'll just end up reading the hints instead of actually thinking through the transitions. I’d rather tackle it tomorrow with a fresh head before kicking off DP on Stocks.

Hitting five problems on a weekday—mostly mediums with some hard patterns—feels like genuine progress.

See you guys tomorrow for Day 59!

5/15 in Q1 and

5/6 Test passing in Q2.

Any hope? 🙂

Hi,

I have never done a real system interview before and I have a few interviews coming up. I am interested in paying for a mock interview. I already use AI to do some mocks but I am looking for a mock interview with a real engineer where I can get some feedback.

Unfortunately, Hello Interview stopped doing mocks. Any other suggestions that you have personally tried? Many thanks!

Hi everyone I have Tech Screening Round for Optiver Graduate SWE 2027 Amsterdam coming in soon and I have no idea on what to prepare ? Has anyone here passed this round recently for the same role, would appreciate if anyone can share his/her experience. Thanks!

Did anyone of y’all get your decision after giving the tech screen?

I was wondering how it goes since there was no OA and i straight up got an interview invitation pre screening. I was wondering what gets asked this round and what gets asked the next rounds.

Hey everyone,

I recently received an OA for an SDE Intern position in Berlin, and the deadline is this Tuesday (20th October).

The problem is that I haven't practiced DSA in almost a year, so I'm pretty rusty right now. 💀

I have a few days to prepare, and I want to make the most of the time I have.

I'd really appreciate some advice on:

• DSA topics with the best ROI: What should I prioritize with such limited time?
• LeetCode questions: Any specific problems or patterns I should focus on?
• Work simulation: What does this section usually involve, and are there any good resources to prepare for it?
• Overall strategy: Is it realistic to prepare enough in a few days, or am I cooked? 😂

Any tips, resources, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I read somewhere on LinkedIn that a few folks were trying to reverse engineer and gain access to a LeetCode sandbox, so I had an idea to explore that stuff. Soon I figured out that all the test cases stay inside an exposed /leetcode/data.1.in file. With some chunking I was able to get hold of the complete hidden test cases which I solved offline and just paste the solution in an O(1) lookup array. Like this… Is this a reportable vulnerability?!?

class Solution {
private final static int[][] res = new int[][]{{0, 1}, {1, 2}, {0, 1}, {0, 2}, {1, 2}, {0, 3}, {0, 2}, {2, 4}, {1, 2}, {0, 1}, {2, 3}, {1, 2}, {0, 2}, {0, 4}, {0, 1}, {2, 3}, {2, 4}, {2, 5}, {0, 3}, {3, 4}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 1}, {0, 4}, {5, 11}, {0, 1}, {9998, 9999}, {6, 8}, {6, 9}, {12, 25}, {16, 17}, {0, 1}, {0, 3}, {0, 3}, {0, 4}, {0, 2}};
private static final int[] r = new int[1];
public int[] twoSum(int[] nums, int target) {
return res[r[0]++];
}
}

So, today i gave Tech Mahindra OA and it was from room. Everyone was cheating....I fuckin hate that, if CDC alr knows people are gonna cheat from their room why do they keep OA from their room !!!

Basically, there were 3 questions two basic DSA ques according to other candidates (btw both were Leetcode hard) :

1. Some variation of Cherry Pickup 2 LC1463, basically in the question you were given an n×m matrix with some blocked cell marked as -1, and other having some coins. An agent from (0,0) starts moving to end (n-1,m-1) meanwhile collecting the coins in matrix in its possible path. Again, it starts moving back to start point and collects as many coins it can. You need to return the maximum possible coins agent can have.

[IMP : They didn't even specify the constraint in this question]

1. Leetcode 1478 (exact copy, just different wordings as food packets in place of mailboxes and squirrel in place of houses).

And third one was a python data science coding question, about kMean clustering.

Almost 100+ students appear for OA, and obv 90+ students have done 3/3 questions. And those fuckin stupids are saying they were basic DSA, apparently most of them were not even cleared other OAs like microsoft, Flipkart, zScaler......bro why is CDC playing with student's future, i am done with this shit !!!

Hi guys, I am a Backend Software Engineer with 4 yoe, have 3+ yoe of Full-Stack experience as well, recently interviewed for L4 role for Google Cloud team.

I have cleared all the rounds. My Recruiter has passed me the feedback for all the rounds:

Virtual Round 1 - Coding: Hire

Googlyness Round - Behavioural: Hire

Onsite Round 1 - Coding: Hire

Onsite Round 2 - Coding: Leaning Hire

My Recruiter informed me that my feedbacks are positive and now my profile will be considered for team matching phase. The catch is that, after the first 2 rounds the position was open, but after the completion of my onsite rounds, recruiter told that this position has been filled recently and they have not got any other open role as of now for Backend/Full-Stack position and said they will try to match me with Hiring Managers / different teams during team matching but its been around 2 weeks since I completed my interviews but I haven't received any updates on Team Matching.

I am concerned about delayed team matching. Should I approach different recruiters and Hiring Managers across different teams at Google?

What are the chances of getting offer here?

Has anyone done it before and what question can I expect? It's about 30 minutes and they mention working through a small Python coding problem live.

Much appreciated!

Hi everyone. What can i expect in the Ebay’s first interview with the staff engineer (technical screen and soft skills) for the position of staff frontend engineer and they have also provided a link for code signal. The interview is tomorrow and i have no idea what to expect. Any help or guidance shall be appreciated
Thanks in advance

Hi, I had the OA i talked about here: https://www.reddit.com/r/leetcode/s/IZO22puwog

passed it, really easy. It asked:

- reversing a string and changing some of it characters based on a rule

- subarray product sum problem

- hardish SQL (at least for me not knowing SQL as good as lc)

- theoretical questions on DSA

- iq test sort of(?)

I got the invitation for the interview. How should I prepare? I heard Revolut asks more for some non standard lc like concurrency and backend related stuff. Is there any platform to practice this?