| How much prep have you done? People have a wide range of reactions to FAANG interviews. One of my friends has panic attacks when thinking about interviews. I actually find LeetCode questions to be fun way to spend the evening and I like being interviewed, but I know I'm in the minority. I consider myself a deep thinker too. And I've been slower at solving interview questions before and got faster over time. The key about doing these problems is not memorization. I haven't memorized binary search. That's not why I'm fast. But I know the concepts and I can reproduce it at will, maybe with a bug or two which I can iron out while walking through it. Solving problems in 40 minutes is actually the very last step in the learning process. So not being able to do that just means you haven't completed your training yet. The process of practicing different problems over and over helps you see the patterns across different types of problems. Similar problems will have similar code structure, data structures, and algorithmic choices. If I hear a new song on the radio I can guess what band it is before the singing starts because bands often have the same style of songs. It's the same thing when I see a coding problem and choose how to solve the problem. It's an impulse I learned from training, it has nothing to do with me being a quick thinker. Some people on Blind mention that they do 100's of questions on LeetCode before doing FAANG interviews. Some still fail. I've failed plenty. |