How many months of full time leetcoding to pass the Google L3 coding interviews?
Dec 26, 2020
59 Comments
If an average CS college grad that has never heard about leetcode before starts grinding leetcode full time today, how long do you think it would take him to get good enough to get a Google L3 offer?
Please only vote if you actually work at Google as a SWE :)
#engineering #software #swe #google #faang
comments
*surprise pickachu face*
ps: i myself have had A/G/snap with 0 LC, in fact I only learnt about LC recently from blind
I personally would rather overprepare than underprepare, and lay the foundation where you can study for interviews more easily in the future. To me this means you go over problems several times, and then you create a "practice framework" so that you can review these problems again in the future more easily than if you started from scratch.
I think a mature engineer I spoke to spent 3 months sacrificing his life outside of work (while he worked) to get several senior engineer roles. He also spent a lot of time on system design. But my point is that he himself said leetcode was his weakness, he *knew* where he was weak, and what he had to do if he was to improve, etc. Reading some of these posts from new hires who got into Google without any practice, just being in a top 30 school... I think yes maybe they are smart, and probably their school had to do with it, and expectations were lower for them for a junior role than a senior role. However I see a lack of maturity in them not admitting where they are weak, or how they could have improved. I think a more mature engineer would acknowledge their weaknesses if they only spent a month or two practicing, not brag about how skilled they are. Look at the people winning algorithmic competitions, they've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours practicing. There's a lot to learn in the world of algorithms, and plenty of room to improve. It's up to you if you want to do the bare minimum or really prepare.
Did you get lucky with questions? Or did you have any previous experience with a good undergrad course on ds algo etc? I think most of the normal folks like us had a bad algo course in uni which in turn results in the need of trial and error like grind.
Would you be able to solve something like alien dictionary in an interview? Just curious
this is why even though I did 400 (100 easy/280 medium/20 hard) question I failed my Amazon phone screen for L4 position 5 days ago when I could not figure out how to update my heap correctly
T_T guess I will need to do 200 more