Most of my life I have worked on C programming language and used it in embedded programming, I love to code in it. But when I jump to Leetcode for solving things, I see C takes a lot of time, lines of code, whereas python does the job in few lines itself.

But still I think with C I am knowing what I am doing it gives me more freedom to actually see what is going in background whereas for python, boom, include some magic** and it works like a charm,

I am open to learn Python but not sure will it help me out in real world interviews, if someone asks me something, i am not a competitive programmer, I want to just learn new things and use them in my work,

any guidance should I go for python? or stick to C?

e.g. Sorting algos we need to implement in C to solve a question, max I can use is a qsort but python does the job using sort() function not sure if many python programmers know what goes in the background of sort() function, I may be wrong

Hey all, Evan here again.

We have more System Design breakdowns for you! This time for the popular question, .

We're now up to 14 total breakdowns for common problems. If you have a system design interview coming up, I highly recommend you give them a read through!

We also started making YouTube videos for many of these. So if videos are your thing, checkout:

You can vote for what question you want us to breakdown next by . We'll do a detailed breakdown for the top voted question every couple of weeks.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here or on the posts themselves!

Are the 2025 batch Placements gonna be worse than the 2024 batch. What are your views about, would love to know.

What is the point of preparing for a job that aint even secure, u can get laid off any time. Then you will have to prepare leetcode again wtf. Are they any better jobs for a cs major that are not stressful and secure. Im so frustrated cuz of cheatings in OAs, i just cant take it. I feel like running away to the mountains.

Here's a detailed breakdown of my recent interview experience with Microsoft. I hope it helps anyone preparing for a similar set of interviews!

• Microsoft Role: Senior Software Engineer (Azure)

• Hiring Quota: 5 spots available

• My Demographics: White // Male // Millennial // 6 Years of Experience // US Citizen

• Current Role: Staff SWE // Large startup // Fully remote

• Resume:

• Microsoft Offer: Role: Senior SWE (L63) // Base: $176k // Signing Bonus: $15k // Stock: $120k over 4 years // Bonus: 0-30% // Fully remote

05/04/2024 - Applied on website (found role on LinkedIn)

05/16/2024 - Recruiter Email

Included ~20 questions. Questions were biographical/hr, background/experience, what you're looking for in your next role, and 2 role specific questions.

06/18/2024 - Technical Screen

• Who? Principal Engineering Manager (hiring manager)

• What? 1hr. LeetCode

• Question? (domain/details were changed but problem was basically the same)

• How'd I do? Fine. Didn't find an optimal solution. Barely found any real solution, tbh. Interviewer stepped in to help many times. I made the key insight to treat the data as a graph and I think that was required not to fail. I was very communicative and that's probably why I passed.

07/01/2024 - Onsite Prep

30 minute prep call with recruiter/scheduler.

07/02/2024 - Onsite Rounds 1 & 2

Round 1:

• Who? Principal Engineer

• What? 45 min. LeetCode, 15 min system design.

• Question? . Interviewer also expected it to be implemented in an object oriented manor.

• How'd I do? I think I failed this one tbh and it got me down-leveled from 64 -> 63. I gave a solution involving binary search/inserts over a sorted list. Correct answer is min/max heap. It's a commonly known problem and I think the interviewer basically expected me to know it. Positive feedback was that I communicated well and structured the interface well, even if implementation was suboptimal.

Round 2:

• Who? Senior Engineer

• What? 1hr. LeetCode

• Question?

• How'd I do? Perfect. I coincidentally did this one the day before, and I believe I had more experience than the interviewer.

07/03/2024 - Onsite Rounds 3 & 4

Round 3:

• Who? Senior Engineer

• What? 30 min. LeetCode, 30 min system design.

• Question? Basically create a class that lets you add/remove nodes from a tree. Started with coding, then asked to convert to distributed system.

• How'd I do? Very positive feedback on the coding problem (super simple problem, but I think my communication went a long way). Fine feedback on the system design. Basically just had a client, load balancer, service, and database lol.

Round 4:

• Who? Principal Engineering Manager (different from tech screen)

• What? 15 min. technical/background discussion, 45. min system design.

• Question? Pretty challenging question about creating a aggregating all data for all tenants in Azure. The hard part is not making too many requests to any tenant/subscription at once (or else you'll rate limit the customer).

• How'd I do? Okay. Was caught off guard since the recruiter told me this round would be all experience/culture. The solution is to query each tenant and add their subscriptions to a queue, then for each subscription in the queue add all their resources to another queue, then for each of those get the data. I tried some sort of Apache Spark scheduling thing to balance between tenants the interviewer didn't like. The interviewer told me the correct answer is to re-enqueue a job every time you hit a rate limit (with some jitter to prevent bunching). I didn't finish in time, but the interviewer gave me an extra hour to finish the whiteboard design and snapshotted it after.

07/08/2024 - Initial Offer

Negotiations ongoing.

07/15/2024 - Final Offer

Offered $194k base, and I declined the offer.

LC Stats

From Jan 2024 when I started practicing until the day of the first onsite.

• 2.2 problems per day

• 31 active days

• 68 solved problems

• 24 easy (35%)

• 44 medium (65%)

• 0 hard (0%)

• 80 attempts

• 12 retries

• 57.51% avg runtime

• 47.19% avg memory

• 0:30:20 avg problem

• 1:15:50 avg day

• 40:26:48 total time

My Top Resources

• LC Problem Selection:

• LC Solutions:

• System Design Subjects:

• System Design Strategy: ,

• Other: ,

I had an interview with a big local IT company today. After a brief introduction, I was given a problem to be solved. The problem required me to return squared values of elements in a sorted array in the sorted order. During the interview, I discussed some ineffective solutions using sorting, heap, and two arrays. Finally, I proposed a linear time solution using two pointers and implemented it in Python. I finished the solution (with working code) ~ 30 min after the beginning of the interview (including the introduction of myself and the problem), and the interviewer said something like "It is everything clear to me, we can finish the interview at this moment". He asked if I had any questions about the company/position/etc. I have asked a few. But now I am full of doubts. The interview should go for 60 min. Usually, they ask to solve 2 problems but I was asked to solve only one.... Based on your experience, is it a good or bad sign?

I am a third year CS major, but I really don't do competitive programming. Like I can code, I do leetcode, gfg etc but not cf,cc and all. All others in my college are doing CP, but I don't want to do it, I'll rather solve random questions on leetcode. What are your opinions on this? Should I start CP or learn some other new skills??

As the title says. I'm sick unfortunately. Have a raging fever and vomiting everywhere. Up at 5am. Anyways thinking about messaging the recruiter and ask them to reschedule. Should I message them or just power through?

Same as the title

I'm interviewing at a company that has very few tagged problems on Leetcode. There's less than handful of them and they're all from 2 years ago or later. Are the tagged problems actually accurate past the 6 months list in your experience?

I have an upcoming System design and Pair programming round at Circle. What to expect in these interviews? I have just started preparing for System design.

Got laidoff 3 months back and Have been interviewing, keep getting rejected even when the interview went great. Any help or inputs is really appreciated.

Thanks!!!

I am an upcoming sophomore and I wanted to explore DSA in Python and was looking for resources for the same. I don't mind buying some course if it is good. I completed C programming from college Wallah youtube channel and was thinking of buying it's DSA with python course. If any one has taken that course I would love to hear the reviews regarding the same and other resources for DSA in python are appreciated.

Thanks in advance :)

I've been familiarising myself with LeetCode contests and I haven't actually participated in any because they don't really fit my schedule.

I have so many questions to ask as there is not much info on LC about them.

First of all, is LeetCode literally just not doing anything about contest cheaters? I open up a contest discussion to see thousands of people ranting on about top 10 LeetGPT cheaters. Does LeetCode not even take this seriously? You get 5000 LeetCoins and a free backpack for achieving first place, like come on! Where is the regulation here?

Second of all, does the contests take place at strictly 8am or 8pm depending on whether it's the biweekly or the weekly? So there's no way to make it flexible for your schedule?

And finally, are all the problems from the contest new? Like I notice that all the problems are just the very last LeetCode problems, from like 32XX or something like that. Does this mean that every contest 4 new problems are added to the ever-growing library? So it is impossible for anyone to have done the problems before the contest?

I am so confused...

I've done almost 200 questions on leetcode so far(so I'm not a beginner) but only 5 of those are hard coz I'm generally underconfident and also when I try, I generally struggle doing them. So I wonder how do i solve the hard questions?

Has anybody given uber internship test, how were the questions?

I have an OA coming up for JUSPay . Can anyone having Leetcode Premium share the list of questions asked in Juspay , it would really help me alot ? Thanks ✨️

Hi guys! I am currently preparing for the Palantir tech interview and I do not have premium atm. Would anyone mind posting a list of tagged questions?

Why leetcode shows my today submissions as if a did them yesterday? Can i adjust that? My strike is broken because of that, qnd i don't know if i did something wrong or I'm missin a setting

Hi All,

I have been grinding LC for more than 100 days now. I have coded all the problems in GRIND-75 and 111/150 from Neetcode, mostly by watching some video. I never copy the code but implement the explanation myself. But when i see a new problem or even the problems i have solved few weeks back, i get anxious that i won't be able to solve. However, I can correctly guess what DS/approach will be used but cannot solve the problem within 20-30 minutes sometimes even after 1 hour. It makes me sad and irritated. I don't want to give up but it is hard to keep myself motivated. Most of the days i feel sad because i couldn't solve that one problem.

I am thinking to attend contests or daily challenge but i am scared that i will fail miserably. Please help me guys.

I have a 9-5 job and a family with children.

Edit - I must admit that sometimes, i just keep writing code half-heartedly and submitting on LC. I think, i should not start writing code until i have written psuedo code on paper and dry run with few test cases.

Thanks.

Did anyone had their gs internship tests uptill now? Like anyone from iits. What were the exact ques asked? For all the part, theory, probability, coding

I was wondering if a web developer should know how to solve hard leetcode problems or even i fdoing leetcode helps to get a jod as a web developer? Im about to get my.first job y I'm nervous bc I don't know if I'm smart enough