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> Do you really think they'll be cooking up fresh new interview questions or just going on leetcode and picking their fav question so that they can get done with the interview and get back to their sprint deadline?

At my FAANG, all publicly available interview questions (published on leetcode, interview prep groups, or anywhere else) are prohibited. So yes, people do come up with original questions, and then get those questions reviewed by their peers.

The benefit of leetcode is to re-familiarize yourself with algorithms that you might not have seen since university days, and to practice staying cool and coding under time pressure. Not with practicing the answer to specific questions you will be asked.

> all publicly available interview questions (published on leetcode, interview prep groups, or anywhere else) are prohibited.

And how thoroughly is that prohibition enforced? Do you scrape libgen, for instance? Coursework on university websites? Mathoverflow? I'm guessing not.

Personally, I have asked people old "folklore" questions in interviews, and probably will again. They're not on leetcode, but anyone who paid attention in a sufficiently good CS program has seen them before - and honestly, I don't really care to filter those people out, given the overall state of the candidate pool.

> And how thoroughly is that prohibition enforced? Do you scrape libgen, for instance? Coursework on university websites? Mathoverflow?

No idea, I'm not involved with that effort. I did see a question I wanted to ask get banned because it was leaked in a private interview prep group. And I saw questions get banned for being, at their core, too similar to leetcode ones (despite not having the same problem statement).

Very true. Practice for 3 months and you’ll know 90% of the solutions cold.

For a salary of $700k - staff - it’s easily worth it

He’s not getting a staff position at any tech company with no previous experience at a large tech company by “grinding leetCode”

$400k for an senior software engineer.

There is a market for leetCode - unforutnately or not - you have to accept it.

He’s probably not going to get a senior software engineer position just by “grinding leetCode” if all he has done is pull tickets off the board in enterprise dev shops without showing “scope” and “impact” and without any system design know how.

That’s not meant to be an insult and from all indications from his question that’s what he has done - which is the same thing most of the 2.7 million devs in the US do. In fact that’s what I did for most of my career until 2 years ago.

The only reason I ended up in $BigTech was because I did have “system design”, project management, requirements gathering, and other soft skills that allowed me to get into the cloud consulting department (yes full time with the same 2 year signing bonus 5/15/40/40 vesting scheduling that all employees get).

I know there is a market for leetCode and I encourage my younger relatives who are graduating in CS to “grind leetCode”. I am pushing back on the thought process that 15 years of enterprise Dev experience means much of anything, at most he can get an SWE II position just by studying a few months.

I wouldn't approach it with this attitude. Preparation is good, but really the most important thing to do is be able to look at a problem and identify what approach is correct.

Coding rounds are fairly predictable and are a great equalizer, which is why companies use them. Focus on being able to identify what data structure and which algorithm to use and you're already halfway there!

> To get a perspective on this: think from the perspective of a FAANG interviewer. Say, they are 3 years out of college and have been asked to take an interview. Do you really think they'll be cooking up fresh new interview questions or just going on leetcode and picking their fav question so that they can get done with the interview and get back to their sprint deadline?

This is a bit absurd! Interviewers are trained and constantly calibrated so that all candidates have as much of a fair chance as possible. Questions come from a common bank, engineers are not expected to come up with their own.

Anyways to the original question - try studying something like leetcodes explore section and get familiar with each concept one at a time. Then read problems and just try to identify the approach, then read the solution.

If you still struggle with this type of interview, then just focus on companies which have take home projects. There are tons of great companies out there outside of big tech!