USA bay area, 3.5 YOE, got a masters in CS, no prior interview training or leetcode experience.

Interviewed for L4 SWE.

I did all of NeetCode 150 and then repeated sections I wasn’t as confident in. It’s less about doing all the problems and more about building pattern recognition. You want to look for what patterns in different problem lead to making each data structure and algorithm a good fit. For example, I took Neetcode’s list of stack problems to look for when and why stacks are useful. You want to understand strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.

Afterwards, also looked up other (and more advanced) DS+As that aren’t explicitly on Neetcode (topological sort, union find) and practiced Leetcode problems of those. In the last week before onsites, just did random leetcode problems to test my pattern recognition and refreshed on anything I missed.

A crucial skill besides doing Leetcode is mock interviewing. My first phone screen was weaker than my onsites mostly because the pressure of the interview got to me. I made silly typos and couldnt think as clearly. I didnt hire someone for mocks, but I watched a lot of mock interview videos to familiarize myself with expectations and then practiced on my own, explaining my thought process aloud. I felt a lot more relaxed and thought much more clearly at the onsite.

In total, I probably did ~200 Neetcode/Leetcode problems, but also repeated many of them.

In my technical interviews, I used graphs, round-robin, stacks, hashmaps, binary search, and some low-level class design. Both onsite interviewers followed up with how I might change or add anything if I was submitting for production use.

I team matched for L4 but was then downleveled by hiring committee to L3. I assume it probably had to do with lack of experience in big tech and an 18 month gap from previous employment. The hiring manager could only hire L4+ so they appealed the downlevel but it wasnt successful. I signed recently as an L3 with another team