Anyone nail Leetcode interviews with no prepping?
Ever heard of any programmer who never done this type of coding (via practicing on leetcode/hackerrank/... or doing code competitions and such) go in and just kills it? Is this possible with your super smart all-star "10X engineers" and phd algo experts?
Rajnikant has done this once. Leetcode gets all it's problems from him now.
Thanks for lightning that serious mood
Easier to do for new grads who just finished the algorithms class. And the expectations are not that high for lower levels. A friend got a FAANG offer with no prep whatsoever.
That sounds so Amazon
Most of the easy to medium leetcodes are common sense knowledge that you do use at work one way or another (if you disagree, your work sucks). You can do it with a bit of luck as long as you are comfortable during the interview. Now, there are of course trees, graphs and DP problems that aren’t obvious, but in most cases engineers fail because they just can’t focus on finding optimal solution to *easy* problems during the interview.
Never practiced. Got offers from google amazon and Microsoft every time. Never once been interviewed and not gotten an offer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 20 yoe
Will you be my mentor? Please.
And yet you would choose to work at Amazon? Madness.
Well, there was a time when Leetcode didn’t exist at all. How did all those engineers get hired at Google 15 - 20 years ago? And don’t say interviews were easier back then. The difficulty has been pretty much the same, sometimes tougher (Sergey interviews).
Back then they were asking to calculate the number of ping-pong balls that fit in a school bus.
As far as I remember, those questions were for PMs or other non Eng roles. Roles that needed a certain personality that can give interesting answers on what to do if you are shrunk to the size of a nickel and stuck in a blender. For Eng, we had similar “napkin” or back-of-the-envelope calculations but closer to system design. Like, how many phone numbers are needed to serve New York and how many machines needed to manage them. But we always had whiteboarding interviews since the beginning. Brain teasers or puzzles were never the bulk of the interviews. At most, you’d get one per interview.
Yes, I know someone like this. Passed google onsite with 2 days of prep and less than 20 LC done. Rest of time was spent playing video games. People like that are really rare. His IQ is like 150+.
Yes. Nailed 9/10, no prepping. Double majored in systems and theory. Won regional programming contests in high school. Most of the multi step problems I produced an optimal algorithm on the first try.
How did you accomplish this?
One of my closest friends graduated from Cal CS and got into Google with no leetcoding at all. He just studied really hard in all his classes, especially algorithms. He’s been there for many years doing some amazing things. Dude is truly gifted though.
“He just studied really hard in all his classes, especially algorithms.” How is that different than leetcoding?
Is studying hard now considered “Leetcoding”?