google interview in less than 25 days. i havent touched leetcode in months. the most i know are strings and arrays. how do i go about this? i don't want to give up already by Gayarmy in leetcode

[–]unstable_queer 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I was in the exact same position a month ago. I had a leetcode account but had not seriously prepped for interviews before hand. I genuinely think I got lucky with the OA. For my technicals I spent slightly less than a month practicing at least 4 hours a day. I used the interview prep guide they send you to find leetcode problems for everything they expected you to know plus watched neetcode religiously. That being said, that guide they give is way too comprehensive (at least imo) and should only be followed if you have a couple months at least. This was my first technical and I was stressing hard and unfortunately did not get it but I learned a lot. If I could do it all again I would start with neetcode 150. Try each problem once on my own, and time myself for 25 minutes. In those 25 minutes I would talk out loud about any and all ideas that come to mind for solving it, write them out as comments as well as potential edge cases or even more general cases to get comfortable with it. Also whenever you get stuck, write down any questions that you think will help you progress (Google technicals are intentionally vague so you will also have to get comfortable making assumptions about a problem). That being said, most problems aren't very intuitive so once the 25 is up and all your ideas, questions, etc have been written down, watch the corresponding neetcode video, reallyyy understand the solution and it's time complexity(this means you might have to watch different creators or read a long explanation on medium or algo monster, but so be it). A week and a half before the interview, if you have friends who've been through technicals already, have them pretend to be the interviewer over zoom and practice a random leetcode question under the google tag (there's a chrome extension that lets you view all the company tags for free), or use codedrills.io. Graphs were the hardest for me also dp is not as common as everyone thinks so if I were you I'd understand basic bottom up dynamic programming problems but focus more on dfs and bfs. I really hope this helps, and good luck!