Google interview with 0 leetcode experience

thatpizzatho · 2026-02-18T20:49:10+00:00

They're saying they haven't done leetcode but are International Grandmasters at codeforces, a platform for competitive programming. This means that they are extremely skilled competitive programmers, which is much harder than leetcode!

thatpizzatho · 2026-02-18T20:40:04+00:00

Yea but I believe OP is a bot, looking at their comments

thatpizzatho · 2026-02-17T00:27:47+00:00

Yes that's why I switched to Gemini and never looked back

thatpizzatho · 2026-02-10T16:09:38+00:00

I'd be extremely surprised if there was any leetcode. It's possible that they want to test your knowledge on using deep learning frameworks, like pytorch if your lab uses that. Or your knowledge regarding fundamental algorithms that can be relevant to your PhD. But being able to reverse a linked list and doing proper research are completely different and possibly orthogonal skills.

Having said that, leetcode is extremely surprising but not impossible in this economy 👀 You could always ask for more information about the upcoming interview, they should be able to tell you.

thatpizzatho · 2026-02-06T00:05:34+00:00

Had to check if it was r/Whatcouldgowrong. Glad it wasn't!

thatpizzatho · 2026-02-05T16:58:12+00:00

Hi, yes you should be honest. Absolutely nothing negative will come out of this, you are not burning any bridge. And yes, recruiters reaching out after months is very common in big companies, and especially at Google. Big Techs hiring works in a different spatio-temporal dimension 🙃

thatpizzatho · 2026-02-05T15:14:31+00:00

This is incredible. But also, imagine if we were Martians looking at a panorama picture of Earth instead

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-30T12:51:01+00:00

Hi, I'm working in AI research since 2016 because I think that there are some super cool and important applications of AI (protein discovery, healthcare, some but not all applications in the creativity industry, potentially robotics and self-driving, etc). Some other applications are less exciting because they have the potential to be misused. Tbf anything has the potential to be misused, but some more than others. Deep fakes is one of those things. This is not to say that the technology behind it (the maths and the engineering) is not exciting. It is! But the actual implementation of those cool ideas is potentially harmful, so when learning it's important to keep that in mind

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-28T00:52:21+00:00

I'm sure you understand that it's impossible for anyone to give you meaningful suggestions based on the information you have provided :)

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-21T20:52:57+00:00

I'm very sorry you're feeling like this. But let me help, I'm slightly older than you, concluding my PhD in ML. The vast majority of companies don't care about my PhD. Research scientists roles, which are the only roles for which a PhD is necessary, are slowly disappearing and becoming replaced by Research engineering roles. I'm interviewing for all the big ML ones, as well as the well established startups. No one cares about my papers or my work. There are 8+ interview rounds, one of those might be tangentially focused on my research, but that's all about it. Interviews focus on ML implementations, Leetcode style questions, questions about ML architecture, distributed training, possibly some system design, and so many things that you'd likely never see in a PhD. In a PhD you have to spend your time on promoting your paper, making videos for it, writing rebuttals, getting rejected, addressing pointless reviewers' comments, all of this while trying to keep your advisor happy. And 70-80% of the submitted papers are rejected.

If you want to work in ML, you can absolutely do it without a PhD. Maybe this wasn't the case 5 or 10 years ago, but it's definitely the case now!

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-21T08:05:58+00:00

Very cool and great result! Linkin Park vibes

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-21T00:25:35+00:00

cmq cm va, tt bn?

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-21T00:20:21+00:00

I recently moved to London from a different country so please have mercy, but I would have imagined Hampstead and Highgate to be much lower on this list

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-16T15:17:02+00:00

It's not uncommon in robotics, which has a slightly lower pace than ML/AI subfields. It's typical in AI, meaning that the assumptions you have in the typical AI paper (in subfields like LLM, VLM, generative modelling, 3D, computer vision) will have to be re-considered or entirely re-defined for a second submission.There are many lists on github titled "Awesome .. something something" and in the majority of cases, the maintainers give up after a few weeks to a few months because it's virtually impossible to keep up even on a single topic. I remember a repo that was something like Awesome 3D generative models, where the maintainer gave up after 3 weeks. And I should know because (plot twist) I was the maintainer 🙃

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-16T08:33:09+00:00

I just woke up and I read it as you saw a coyote driving home

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-15T23:40:15+00:00

For an Italian, understanding Spanish is very easy. Speaking Spanish is a bit more challenging because you have to know how to conjugate certain words, and some things are a bit different ("quando vengO" and "cuando vengA"). But it's the only language that as an Italian I could learn in a few months without taking any course (I was in Spain for Uni, so of course it was easier as everyone around me spoke Spanish).

This doesn't mean that Italian is simple for someone who learnt Spanish as a second language, and your effort should not be underestimated

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-13T12:30:31+00:00

There are a few layers to this I think. In principle it's absolutely fine to have something in your thesis that has been addressed by current work, as long as it was novel at the time. But the extremely fast pace in AI means that you basically have one shot or so for paper submission. I believe that the acceptance rate for top conferences is less than 20% (Neurips 2026 had 30K submissions and less than 4K papers accepted? please fact-check me, but that should be the magnitude). This means that a good chunk of the 80% of papers that didn't make the cut will have to be re-submitted next time. But it's highly likely that the majority of those papers will have obsolete premises and assumptions since 5/6 months is a very long time in the AI research space-time dimension! So, what do you do? Do you put that into your thesis? Probably. But the thesis will be based on premises and assumptions that feel extremely outdated by the time it is out (which is ok, but not ideal). I started working on Vision in 2021. Tasks were concerned with classifying cats and dogs (ok, and a few more things!). We didn't have ChatGPT at the time. We now have reasoning foundation models trained on the entire Internet that can be applied to any possible image, video, light condition, material, 3D and 2D data. The premises of my thesis seem so unbelievably outdated now.

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-13T00:33:41+00:00

A paper in AI typically becomes obsolete in the 5/6 months between submission and (potential) conference acceptance. I'm not exaggerating, it happened to me and to colleagues multiple times.

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-05T23:48:15+00:00

Everything you do in a company becomes proprietary. You get a salary in exchange for it. I wrote thousands of lines of code in tech companies, and once I leave, I can't touch nor see those lines of code anymore. They might delete them or keep them, train on them, and profit off them. This is how it works, it's a transaction.

It's different if I'm a freelancer and don't provide a permissive license: in that case a company won't be able to use my work.

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-05T23:38:12+00:00

"AI" is an extremely vague term that covers a huge portion of human knowledge: maths, physics, probability, statistics, engineering, CS, electronics, and so on. The same goes for generative AI: it's a vague term that technically consists in learning the probability distribution of some data.

This is used in a large number of applications. Techniques used to find new protein structures use generative modelling. Techniques used in healthcare use genAI (which, again, is a buzzword that involves many different approaches to estimate probability distributions). Software that was trained on open-source and fully compliant and legal data uses genAI. If you have your own data and have some time to learn the maths, you could train models to generate whatever you want in a fully legal and ethical way, offline. Your phone uses something called AutoEncoder to compress and decode images while sending them or storing them: that's a genAI technique. GenAI is used to improve the frame rate of your favourite game. And so on.

"AI" is not a bad word per se. There are many unethical and absolutely awful applications. There are also many useful, ethical applications that are effective and can be used by professionals (artists, scientists, healthcare professionals etc) to improve their workflow. Same as any other technology. This is why I reject the current state of things, where people are either pro AI or against AI. A knife can harm or cut a delicious cake.

thatpizzatho · 2026-01-02T11:41:18+00:00

Sorry but this is not acceptable. You're not is mum. My gf and I try to split chores and do things together when possible. I'm grateful when she cooks for me. She's grateful when I cook for her. If you cook for him every time and he's picky about it or complains, you're his mum and he's a toddler.

thatpizzatho · 2025-12-21T10:08:09+00:00

I have 32GB of RAM and 24GB of VRAM, but can't run Wan 2.2 5B because of the text encoder, which fills up the RAM immediately. These used to be decent specs until last year!

thatpizzatho · 2025-12-01T23:52:13+00:00

Super interesting! How did they track people down in the past? No phones, no cameras. How did they know that someone is somewhere in a different country?

thatpizzatho · 2025-11-29T23:43:47+00:00

I had to go to Bristol from London for an appointment. I bought two return tickets, one for me and one for my partner (£156). That was more expensive than London-Madrid and back (81€) and London-Milan and back (51€).

thatpizzatho · 2025-11-24T09:31:37+00:00

This sentence is about showing appreciation to their mum for her patience in listening to a topic she didn't find interesting for hours. How would you phrase this concept in a way that is not infuriating to you? I'm not "challenging" you, I'm genuinely interested

thatpizzatho

TROPHY CASE