20 yoe and trying LC - how to build intuition
Hands on developer, working as lead. 40-60% coding, rest mostly designing distributed systems. Thinking of moving on to another job maybe as manager or Sr Staff at FAANGU. Started working on LC, some Medium level need intuition to solve which is missing ATM. Started with Array types, its tough slog but certainly not boring. Frankly sometimes feel that I am spending too much time on trying to solve medium lvl problem. Have been approached by recruiters or hiring managers from FLUA. Planning to spend till January on preparations, and then try my luck. Any old geeser went this route and want to share experience? TC 360
I have 15 yoe. If you schedule phone screens in January, then you can give yourself another month of leetcode by scheduling on-sites in February. My experience is I spent two months leetcode and failed. I do 1 or 2 problems a night and I think after 2 months I was able to start getting solutions. But it takes me too long, so I failed on speed. This is with close to no intuition and a little luck on the questions. I'm on 3rd month and just starting to see improved intuition. So I'll depend less on luck now. But still no improvement on speed. Not sure when that will come. I think mock interviews will help with that. My advice to you is "don't try your luck." Instead schedule your interviews when you are ready. That depends on how much leetcode you can do per day. And you can gauge your readiness by applying somewhere your not interested in that pays crap. Think of this as a college test where you have the questions before hand. If you take enough time to go through the questions you are guaranteed to Ace it. Also, I say wait because of cool down period if you fail, eg 1 year for Google and 6 months for Facebook, etc. Makes more sense to interview in 6 months when your ready then fail in 2 months and then pass 6 months later.
I was told by G recruiter that there will be only one coding round, and 3 design, and one over lunch. Did you had same format at G?
I have 18 YOE. start with leet easy. I found that mediums use the foundation u built with the easy level and that helps with the speed and intuition. Due to our age there may be a perception of slowness so your instincts about working on this perception are spot on imo.
how many have you done? make sure you’re not taking too long on any given problem. eg if you still have absolutely no idea where to begin after 30 min, definitely check discussion it’s a trade-off and you need to have enough problem exposure to build pattern recognition
Done about 15 in last few days.
yeah uh you need to do a lot more