18 YOE in Dev in midwest but not a strong algorithm Dev. I cleared phone screen, currently practiisng on leetcode. But there is way too many problems, areas to gain knowledge in a month's time. Any suggestions? How did u guys cracked it? Appreciate the responses. Thanks
Agree worh TwoSigma. I have had friends/mentors leave Qcom (arguably not a great company) at Staff and Sr Staff level, and all said they have had to Leetcode a bit ( one guy said 50questions was more than enough for him) . All these guys made it to google
Well, obviously one needs to practice a little, but not for months, unless you didn't write code for last 5 years.
Youd be surprised how many sr Staff here dont write a single line of code, but their system design skills are very sharp cuz they have knowledge of the entore subsystems , have had years of experience developing them etc. Coding is something you can learn thru Leetcode, for sys design you need experience
Op how was your phone screen? I suppose leetcode style. How many questions? How difficult? Thanks!
Two questions. One easy level leetcode Palindrome and second was a mini design question about how to transform existing dir filesystem to a Linux character strict limited filesystem. Discuss design, pros n cons.
Use the problems as a way to learn the underlying concept that they are testing. The "related concepts" are a good indicator. For example, don't just look at a problem and try to brute Force it, if you see it tagged as a dynamic programming problem, really try to figure out how to do the problem in that way and why that way is the best. It'll help you pattern recognize and develop an intuition I just finished my onsite(still waiting on feedback) and there were one or two problems where I could tell while talking through things that they had a specific strategy in mind, even though there were other (not as efficient) strategies.
Good tip thanks. U went for staff as well? How was it?
Just regular SWE
Nothing less than perfect interviews will do 🙁
don’t expect to get original Leetcode questions in google onsite, but the ideas are similar
Leetcode is not going to help you on that level :) For staff eng you either know your shit or not.
I wish this was true but it’s not. Even if you know your shit you’re competing against people who know their shot and prepared vs people who know their shot and didn’t. This means the interviewer is going to judge you against people who’ve been preparing for months and expect a good candidate to perform like they do.