How did you prepare for FAANG interviews?

[smartidiot]

Been a while since I last interviewed. I have a Google interview for SW Eng coming up but I'm kind of lost as to how to prepare. I see there's paid subscription in leetcode but it just seems too expensive and to be honest it seems like an overkill. I hear people spent months preparing for it.

So. What is your experience with it? What would you suggest? I haven't set up dates yet but I think I'd do it in a few weeks time and just review some basic algorithms in the meantime. I do have a day job and a family so won't have much time.

Thanks

[pizza234]

Leetcode is probably the best resource (I've tried a few) for programming problems. They're very representative of real-world interviews (medium difficulty will do).

I'm confused by your judgment of the price. The Leetcode premium price for a couple of months is peanuts for an SWE.

Additionally, you'll need to add systems design studies, if required. This will cost you extra money, to spend at leat on Grokking the systems design interview.

Finally, it's extremely important to do mock interviews (which will also cost you, unless you decide to use pramp, which, however, is lower quality); while the experience of being interviewed on programming problems is not really different from Leetcode, systems design, and especially behavioral interviews, can be significantly different (in a "hard" sense) from what one imagines.

[jstx1]

These companies (at least the couple of companies from that group that I've interacted with) are very upfront about the interview process and provide you with enough materials to prepare.

The cost of a leetcode subscription is negligible.

I would practice more problems and try to emulate an interview setting as much as possible - set yourself a fixed time to solve the problem, walk over your solution, think about it out loud if you get stuck etc. I don't think that going over basic DS&A is enough on its own.

[throwaway34324]

I think LeetCode premium is worth it. As well as the company-specific sections in Explore, I found the Learn sub-section to be very useful

[goldname]

"just review some basic algorithms" lol.

[smartidiot]

Care to elaborate or is lol the best you have to offer here?

[goldname]

it's the best i got