Its a given that if you are trying to get into faang you are going to need to spend a considerable amount of time trying to game the interview process by doing as many leetcode problems and mock interviews as you can before the interview. And then still there is no guarantee, even if you ace all rounds and pass all the coding challenges.
Can you share some tips on how you achieved this? What did you do if you got stuck on a question you just couldn't solve? Did you look at the answer and memorized it? How many questions did you solve? Were they mostly mediums or hards? What about system design, any specific resources you used?.
I keep coming back to leetcode every few months but I always get stuck on mediums so I'd appreciate any tips you can share!.
As an average/below average engineer with 15 yoe who wouldn't pass SV-style interviews no matter how many leetcode problems I solve, I've only had to use algorithms a handful of times in my career.
One of the most memorable was when I had to build a graph from sql statements, parse the sql statements, determine the dependencies between the sql statements by traversing the syntax tree and ordering the graph based on the dependencies so sql statements on each level could be evaluated in parallel.
It was one of the most fun and interesting projects I've ever worked on, it took me a few days to come up with a Java implementation and after a few bugs I rewrote it in Scala. I think I ended up with some kind of DFS algorithm if I recall, I might give it a shot at implementing it from memory and putting it on github.