leetcode challenge
How come you guys get so good at leetcode and crack google/netflix interview in just matter of few weeks. I am struggling to keep myself motivated to do this leetcode shit. I think its a test for my consistence and perseverance more than the coding skills. Anyone here who took more than 6 months? Please share your struggle story.
Try coding game website. 5 min coding clash in real-time with others is super addictive. Of course these questions are easy compared to leetcode but the idea is to slowly develop perseverance
Link?
https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer Then click join clash and the match will start in 2 minutes. You will have 10 to 15 minutes to solve the problem. You can solve it in 5 anyway.
For me, it's a test of both coding skills and perseverance. But the stressful part is every question seems like a new question to me, I am unable to find patterns or relate to previous questions. I also struggle a lot with writing the correct code even when I know the algorithms. I think of coding not as a 2 months bootcamp to crack Faang but as a skill I slowly get comfortable with. It's been a few months since I have been LCing but then my starting point was way lower than many others here.
This is what worked for me. I was able to crack Google, LinkedIn and Amazon. This strategy might not work for everyone! For DS and Algos, I never touched anything other than LC. I have practiced around 320+ questions. When I started practicing around a few months back, it use to take me around 20-30 mins to solve even an easy question. And I used to take a long time to solve each question but I knew that things would get easier. I was mainly focusing on getting my understanding of Collections and Arrays right! I would also spend a lot of time on googling which collection to use in which cases. Overtime, I started getting a good grasp of it. I started asking myself questions like how do I decide if I want to use a Priority Queue or a TreeMap? After 1 month, when I started feeling confident about the DS, I moved on to a bit more advanced topics like Trees, Graphs and DP because all these topics use the basic collections I had already studied. I would solved questions on these topics and the previous topics in a mixed manner (didn’t give too much importance to one topic over the other). Then, one day my friend asked me as to why I haven’t looked at the Trie DS? It was the best input ever! One of my rounds, both at Amazon and Google, focused only on Trie! Over a period of 2-2.5 months, I could see that I was solving easy questions in under 10 mins and medium questions in around 20 mins, on a compiler! Also, there is no point in keep solving new questions. it is very important that you keep revisiting your old solutions every now and then. Not only you will realize that you had forgotten quite a few solutions but also, you will realize that you have started thinking about smarter and cleaner code over time! P.S.- I was a C++ developer until 5 months back. Right when I made a switch to Java, was around the time I had started preparing for interviews as well. So, I had no idea how to use collections and all that. That’s why, I had to start ground up!
Did you receive offers from Google and Amazon?
I can share my experience as someone who has a PhD in CS from a top 30 school (not great but decent), and worked for 10 years afterward. I failed google interviews twice because I was very slow at coding on white board. I actually perform well at work. I started practicing code interviews on interviewbit and did about 100 questions there, very slowly. Some problems took me a day to figure out, but I continued for six months. Then I switched to leet code. I did total 200 problems there in the course of two months. Practice on whiteboard to improve my write speed. Most are easy ones. But it makes sense to me to start with easy ones to cover many different types of problems. After a while I start to see patterns in these problems and generally unless it’s a dynamic programming or greedy problem, I can find the optimal solution fairly quickly. I interviewed some companies, then found I have another problem, I make too many mistakes in my implementation due to not thinking through all the details of the solution before coding. That’s the area I’m trying to improve. But I’m good enough to receive some job offers. Looking back at some of my old implementations from interviewbit, I can see how much my code have changed. Much more concise and clean today than 8 months ago. I had interviews lined up while practicing leet code. I do not recommend that. This will be very stressful. Especially if you see some problem in practice and can’t solve it in 30 min. It will bomb your confidence. Practice now without pressure and do it consistently. I got the cracking the coding interview book recently. The most valuable part is the 7 steps to problem solving. I highly recommend follow these strategies while practice.
“I interviewed some companies, then found I have another problem, I make too many mistakes in my implementation due to not thinking through all the details of the solution before coding.” This is gold. I realized I was doing the same. Still, in most of the cases, I was able to figure out more details after I had already solved half the question, and was still able to correct and complete the solution. But, of course, I didn’t only lose the precious time during the interviews, but also the interviewer would have deducted a few points as according to them, my thought process was not as streamlined as it should have. And things like these result in people getting down-leveled even when they feel that they nailed the interview.
That’s right, only later I read in the CTCI book that she recommends a step before start coding where thinking through the implementation steps, think about all the variables needed and how they are updated. This is the key to go to next level of coding skills in interviews. It’s hard to do but that’s what I’m working to improve.
6+ months is common. Keep going.