It has been a long ride, and I finally achieved my goal to be part of FAANG. My Journey was completely different from anybody else, so I thought of sharing with the Leetcode community to help someone similar in my situation and help them know that there will be light at the end of the tunnel and I trust YOU. Leetcode helped me tremendously in being a better problem solver and a better Engineer. I have got offers from Amazon and Twilio.!

Background:
Ever since I have done my master's in Computer Science, I was always fascinated by Engineering excellence and how things are designed on a very large scale. One day I thought what does it take to get into one of those big companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc so that's when I started Leetcoding and reading more about the large-scale systems.

I started practicing by solving LC easy which felt incredibly hard as that was my first time starting problem-solving after a long time after graduation. After that, it took almost 6 months of consistent effort to be able to solve easy questions in under 10 mins. Once I was able to solve these questions, I felt confident enough to skip my preparation for 6 months or so, and not to mention at that point I felt that this was easy and it won't take much time to crack one of those companies. It turns out I was completely wrong and when I came back from a 6-month break, I was at the same stage where I started and felt very disappointed and almost gave up. This time I thought to take a break again after 3-4 months of struggle because I was on a dev plan for a company that I working for and should work on that first and be able to sustain my current job. 

If you are reading up this far I know what you have been going through so keep reading. This time I took a different approach, Once I couldn't solve a problem, I have started googling the question and learning more about the intuition behind the problem rather than blindly solving the problem and trying to remembering it. I have started solving Top Interview questions on LC and Blind Curated 75 and started with brute force and gradually going my way up. One of the important factors for me at least to be confident is to convert my thought process into actual working production-ready code so I worked on that for almost a year or so and even working today for one of those difficult problems like Burst Balloons and almost every DP problem.

During this time, I was really struggling to be consistent with my preparation, because LCing is hard, and by this time everybody who has been solving problems for a while would definitely know that. So many things can happen while you are preparing and it is important to be consistent and dedicated. One of the things that really helped me was LC Daily Challenge which literally changed my preparation strategy to solve one problem a day and gradually increase based on your free time. It was really important to be breadth-first rather than depth-first as it allows you to know and not know how to solve a problem. 

In 2020 April, Amazon Reached out to me for an SDE role for which I have cleared the OA and asked them for a couple of months to be more prepared and give it my best shot. I did prepare consistently with all the mistakes that I have learned in the past and prepared as if this was the only attempt but unfortunately, I didn't perform well in the Object-Oriented Design Round and one of the technical rounds and got rejected. The recruiter asked me to apply for non-technical roles and that struck me a lot and I felt extremely disappointed and started preparing more aggressively by finding an LC buddy and practicing every single day for at least 3 - 4 hours. 

After Amazon attempt and with 3-4 months of preparation. Google reached out to me for another role that they had and this time I decided to give it a shot as I couldn't clear the phone screen last time. I was pretty nervous until the phone screen day and it turns out to be a medium problem on Depth First Search and Recursion which I have solved pretty easily and thought I flunked because I was expecting a couple of questions at least as this was easy. Anyway, I asked my recruiter to schedule the onsite couple of months later which is February 2021, and prepared accordingly. I did my best in all the rounds I can and it was definitely a unique interview experience because most of them are real-world problems and incredibly difficult to solve in 45 mins window that involved advanced algorithms and data structures. As expected my packet was rejected at the Hiring Committee level and I was happy about the fact that everyone gave good feedback about me but the cumulative score was less and they had to reject me this time.

Finally, a manager reached out to me from Amazon and asked me to see if I was interested to be interviewed for an SDE role and the whole process took almost 3 - 4 months, and this time I was cleared for an SDE-2 role and in fact, I couldn't believe it and thought that the email was sent to a wrong person and it took me a while to digest the fact (See above picture) that I cleared the interview and my DREAM came true.

P.S It took a while more than anyone else I have met along my journey. So good things take time and always be patient and wait for your day to come because HARD WORK REALLY PAYS OFF.

I am happy to share my interview experience in another post and will do that shortly after this and feel free to reach out to me if you need any help with your interview preparation or for a mock interview and I would be more than happy to help.