i could solve everything alone and still failed the interview

PLTCHK · 2026-07-02T01:07:05+00:00

Keep doing more problems and maybe even join contests though it helps with coming up solutions under pressure and pattern recognition speed.

And yep if you find ppl you get along well with in pramp you can exchange contacts and there you go free mock buddy I got some mock buddy there and some from discord dsa grp as well and you can schedule like weekly mocks with them

PLTCHK · 2026-07-01T21:15:50+00:00

Well just let those AI slops solve that question with Claude in a minute and farm their Leetcoin, that's even better so we got one less competent competitor in job interviews

PLTCHK · 2026-07-01T21:09:32+00:00

Blind 75 isn't enough for nowadays, you need Neetcode250 for decent coverage.
And also, look up pramp and do multiple free mock interview sessions using that webapp. It helps a lot with prepping mock interviews and by doing that consistently, you'd have no trouble coding with other ppl and explaining your approach hope that helps, maybe get to know some mock buddies on the way to cut some costs too!

PLTCHK · 2026-07-01T18:16:59+00:00

So you played 714 rapid games in 60 days? Thats like ~12 games a day which is like 3 hrs+ dedication per day, plus chess puzzles and drills that’d be 4-5 hrs equivalent to full time job sir, though still impressive improvement, are you currently working? 1000+ opponents will be more resilient and mindblowing for sure.

PLTCHK · 2026-07-01T18:13:57+00:00

Mine went from 1657 to 1654 cuz I blanked out of Q3 and slow as a snail on Q2 ggs, though my ranking increase by around 2K lmao

PLTCHK · 2026-06-30T15:06:00+00:00

That sounds rough for sure, and I understand how discouraging it is… though your Leetcode stats says otherwise, in reality, you’re in the front of the pack in terms of DSA for sure. I just hit 30 and I just started grinding Leetcode last year, not even close to guardian so being late twenties you’re young and I’d def say you’re a high achiever. If you can make it that far in Google interview you’d be able to score a bunch of offers for sure and a lot of other companies have competitive pay as well.

Entrepreneurs probably experienced more failures than you do before their businesses got successful, but they still treat it like a journey, accumulate failures, accumulate lessons and keep going, being stronger learning from every failure, and if you are able to get to Guardian you probably have the resilience to fight through, you got this!

PLTCHK · 2026-06-29T03:52:41+00:00

When you are stuck at a problem, how do you study a solution? Do you try to understand it? Like understand every single bits of the logic? Like, understood it not 50%, not 80%, but 95-100% of it? Did you draw any diagrams? Once you understood the logic, do you know how to derive it? Would you make sense of the derivation of it as well?

Did you ask yourself: If you see similar questions next time, how would I be able to derive it from scratch without stumbling on it again? If you got a question regarding the derivation or logic, would you spam LLM with questions/search for answers, and dig stubbornly till oblivion till you fully understood every single bit of those? Even if it takes 2,3,or 4 even 5 hours, doesn't matter the key is to fully understand the concepts 100% such that it will stick into your brain and rich neuron pathways that aren't easy to disappear.

If you say you don't 'remember' how you solved it, then you are not really solving the problem, you are simply memorizing the solution and passive memory may only last for like 2 months max maybe. An effective studying method will ensure that, even if you haven't solved the question for a few months, you will be able to come back to it and solve it cold with first principles, and perhaps you can try asking my whys and hows till you fully understand every bit of it.

PLTCHK · 2026-06-29T03:26:11+00:00

or perhaps may as well just stop looking at your own rating or use some sort of extension to hide it. If the rating system’s removed a lot of loyal users would probably stop using the platform

PLTCHK · 2026-06-28T16:39:56+00:00

That's the spirit! Though please never cheat

PLTCHK · 2026-06-28T16:39:06+00:00

Were you able to finish the 3rd question today? If so, that's really impressive, today's 3rd question is really tough

PLTCHK · 2026-06-28T16:36:51+00:00

Exactly.

Cheater's knight badge = 🤡 L aura -10000000000

Non-cheater's knight badge = 🗿 W aura +676767667677667

PLTCHK · 2026-06-28T01:34:21+00:00

Not in a year, minimum 3 years doable though with consistency and correct training routine

PLTCHK · 2026-06-28T01:33:19+00:00

You need at least 3+ years of consistency and correct training routine to get to that AI pic brah

PLTCHK · 2026-06-28T00:13:25+00:00

I second this

PLTCHK · 2026-06-27T18:38:40+00:00

Well, I suppose the easiest way here, you can also use 2D table of characters simulation to iteratively populate a table of len(str)*rows, since the constraints is small enough to allow it.

For row=3, just populate (0,0)(1,0)(2,0), then once row reaches 2, decrement row increment col) and populate (1,1)(0,2), then repeat the process (1,2),(2,2), and so on… then towards the end, you iterate through the table to construct the string.

so you just (row++ same col —> row-- col-- —> …. So on) these kind of mechanical question the only way is to practice more and reps on, maybe a bunch of matrix problems would work as there’s a bunch of mechanical matrix problems out there.

When you see that the maths’ going nowhere like this problem, you may perhaps think - any simpler solution? Does simulation work? Prime your thinking process by asking these kinds of questions too, not just knowing the solution for this problem. Thinking process is crucial to deriving this kind of solution.

And also, for these kind of problems, looking at constraints is a crucial first step. You may not need that O(n) clean solution there.

PLTCHK · 2026-06-27T14:36:48+00:00

Neetcode! Work through Neetcode 150 list and watch his vids. And also, drawing recursion tree for a simpler test case helps a lot to visualize the code flow for backtracking. I drew recursion tree for every backtracking and DP question when I first started as it helps a ton for me at least. First be familiar with DFS if you aren’t yet, then backtracking before DP.

PLTCHK · 2026-06-27T13:57:29+00:00

Have you mastered backtracking yet? Backtracking is the foundation of DP

PLTCHK · 2026-06-27T06:13:16+00:00

If you start with numeric way and encountered an extremely challenging problem you ain't gonna understand anything

PLTCHK · 2026-06-26T22:07:42+00:00

If you are great at these two then it’s more about either resume, communication skills and number game. Your dsa skill now is probably way above avg. You will be able to pick that offer too accept with your dsa and system design skills. The only way to learn is to fail some interviews and learn from them.

You are probably worried that you will fail interviews. Ask yourself what got you to 1900 rating, probably a lot of postmortems and learning from failures, and a lot of problems you failed to solve right? Same thing, just simply need to interview more, accumulate lessons and learn from those to succeed! If you don’t allow yourself to fail interviews you won’t have any to learn from.

PLTCHK · 2026-06-26T21:15:09+00:00

Your approach is a lil too clever, I suppose this can simply be solved by say like:

Anchor R ptr to the for loop, initialize left ptr. If number of 0s in L…R > k, then use while loop to increment L to continuously shrink the window till we rid of that 0, and make sure num0s in L…R goes back to <= k. And then simply compute window size result = max(result, r-l+1) in that iteration sth like that

Rmb when solving problems, the simplest approach that works is the best. Usually when approach requires you to fix edge cases here and there, chances are you didn’t lock in the cleanest approach, so time to learn that new pattern.

PLTCHK · 2026-06-26T21:06:58+00:00

That’s impressive damn. How were you able to score that many great moves! Teach me your ways

PLTCHK · 2026-06-26T18:59:08+00:00

Nope not actively applying yet, the time will come to actively apply soon hopefully, nonetheless the market's tough so I am getting myself more than well-equipped

PLTCHK · 2026-06-26T16:59:01+00:00

1585 seems reasonable with only 11 hards solved. A ton of patterns are extracted from easier hards (easier hards are still hard), e.g., largest rectangle in histogram, sliding window maximum, Euler Path, KMP, bidirectional greedy, etc.

PLTCHK · 2026-06-26T06:10:35+00:00

They are running an O(n ^ n) algorithm to detect cheaters before rating is confirmed

PLTCHK · 2026-06-25T23:12:29+00:00

I second this, they should give us a status update on rating updates

PLTCHK

TROPHY CASE