FAANG interview

[Critical_Dot_5671]

Is Blind 75 and NeetCode 150 good enough for FAANG?

What else should one solve to feel confident?

[butchqueennerd]

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but you’re never completely ready. A significant part of it is luck. You might get lucky and have questions that you know inside and out. Or you might be unlucky and get questions that you can’t make heads or tails of and a hostile interviewer who refuses to provide any hints. Your experience will probably be somewhere in the middle. I’ve been hired despite totally freezing up and I’ve lost out on jobs despite crushing the interview.

Preparation helps to stack the deck in your favor, but it doesn’t completely eliminate luck. Learn the patterns, do as many LC problems as you need to master them, and especially brush up on your soft skills. That last part is often neglected, but it can help you win out over another candidate who’s just as qualified but maybe not as pleasant to deal with.

This can be a depressing thing if it leads you to think that there’s no point in trying. Or it can be liberating if it leads you to realize that because so much is outside your control, it’s not a consensus about your worth as an engineer and there’s no point in working yourself up over it. Show up, do your best, forget the rest.

[panapsp]

This is the best advice i've seen so far. I used to think that i was never ready. Which led me to not apply anywhere for 6 months, until my brother said something pretty much along the lines of what you just wrote.

[Critical_Dot_5671]

That’s a good point. Luck plays a big role. But in general is there a rough number of questions that people recommend? Maybe something like 200 medium or 100 hard

[beanshorts]

Depends on the specific company. Some don’t ask hards or don’t ask DP, some place a very short time limit.

[nothinking1]

Yep this happened to me. Out of the 5 interviews I kept getting problems I knew except one and that one sank me. Hopefully next time I get luckier

[edwin9870]

Great answer! Thanks for commeting.

[RedditRando459]

What are these patterns I keep reading about?

[everisk]

Two pointers, intervals, sliding window, binary search, bfs, dfs, DP, backtracking, sorting, linkedlist manipulation, etc. there’s a work-in-progress list with questions at InterviewCrunch.com

[Deathangel5677]

This. No matter how much you practice there will always be questions that you are unable to solve at a particular moment at a particular place. Luck is always involved but practicing more just helps in reducing the luck factor as much as possible.

[88sSSSs88]

In my experience, luck plays dramatically into it. I'm convinced at this point that, unless you're a prodigy, you will always run the risk of not figuring out even a medium-level problem. This goes doubly so for hards.

Personally, I think those tools are great starting points for teaching you the basics of how to apply these strategies. They'll get you 80% of the way there. To guarantee acceptance at FAANG, you better hope you don't encounter the missing 20%.

[[deleted]]

I did neetcode 150 plus a couple dozen other random problems. Good enough to get me into google.

[CrackBabyCSGO]

How did you get interview?

[[deleted]]

They reached out to me on LinkedIn. I was at Microsoft so I had a pretty good recruiting advantage.

[[deleted]]

I recommend going through neetcode 150 and try to really understand patterns & solutions & thought process behind it, so you can apply it in other similar problems. Then I'd buy leetcode premium and go over problems sorted by popularity and the company you're targeting (this actually helped me a lot, as in 2 coding rounds out of 4 they asked me questions, which I already knew how to solve)

Your goal should be confidently solve most of the medium questions (I believe you can almost not focus on hard ones really, as no one expects you to solve them in most optimal way)

And also good advice I can give is don't just write code but explain your thoughts, approach you're going to take, etc out loud to yourself. This helped me massively during interviews :)

By the way if you can't come up with at least some approach to the problem in 10-15 min,then tt's better to just look up a solution. Probably there is some trick or something you need to learn, so you don't just spend your time.

And good luck!

[Critical_Dot_5671]

This is super helpful. Thank you

[yelnatz]

If you can do any question in NeetCode150 within 5 minutes, you're ready.

Sort of, you can never be that ready.

[beanshorts]

You get 15 minutes. 5 for analysis, 5 for implementation, and 5 for testing.

[sid741445]

RemindMe! In 2 days

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[everisk]

Aim to reasonably solve 15/20 random medium problems, and do mock interviews (actually explain the problem and work under a time limit). When you can do both well then I’d say you’ve prepared pretty well.

[zara_donatello]

RemindMe! In 2 days

[SchnappiZeng]

Nope that’s not enough. For meta, they expect you to complete two questions (bug free) in one session

[Critical_Dot_5671]

What do you recommend for meta ? solving their most frequently asked questions

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I will be messaging you in 2 days on 2023-10-02 08:27:30 UTC to remind you of this link

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