I am a Software Engineer at a small product-based startup and I am looking to get into any of the top product based companies (preferably FAANG). I have been active on LC for the last 1.5-2 years (2021 grad) and have solved around 300 odd problems here & around 100 on GFG.
While I have been active on LC, solving like 1-2 questions daily , I have not done a focused preparation till now that'd make me ready for any interview that revolves around DSA (Amazon, MS & similar companies).Still, I appeared for amazon oa + interviews during nov-dec 2021 & got rejected after the last round (1 oa + 4 tech rounds, tech rounds were clubbed such that 1 & 2 together were elimination rounds and 3 & 4 together were elimination as well). Basically, I did pretty bad in the LP round (last one).
Now, I am preparing a strategy to cover each and every topic in around 120 days (or less if possible) for interviews & also prepare for the increasingly tough OA.
As I wrote earlier, I have solved around 350-400 questions but I am not confident because of lack of focused & short duration prep with lots of revision. I have completed these many questions in a span of 1.5-2 years, I won't even understand how I did some of the questions that I did during my initial days (again, lack of focused, short duration prep).
I am looking to complete around 500-700 questions (including the ones I have already done,) in a span of 4 months (120 days) & revise them daily (literally). Also, I plan to give each and every contest on leetcode during these 120 days (i.e. 3 contests in every 2 weeks, 2 weekly + 1 biweekly & upsolve = 12 extra ques).The revision strategy would be as told by Raj Vikramaditya AKA Striver in this video ().
Enough explaination :P I need help figuring out the timeline of each topic for my ~120 days prep. Here's what I have so far:
- Arrays + Matrix + Two Ptr + Sliding window + Mathematics (maths is mostly seen with array problems): 14 days
- Linked List: 7 days
- Stack + Queue: 14 days
- Tree + Binary Tree + BST + Heap: 21 days
- BFS + DFS + Graphs + Disjoint set: 21 days
- Searching + Sorting + Greedy: 14 days
- Hashing: 7 days
- Strings: 7 days
- Recursion + Backtracking: 14 days
- DP: 30 days
- Tries: 5 days
- Bit manipulation: 5 days
~ 159 days
I'll be trying to do 4 problems everyday during weekdays & a few more on sat-sun. Ideally 1 easy, 2 med, 1 hard but can change depeding on the sheets I'll be following i.e. a mix of striver's sde sheet + love babbar's dsa sheet + a couple others (doesn't really matter though, just gives a structure to the preparation I believe).
Help me figure out how I should structure the prep more, I am not a newbie who should just get the hang of leetcode. It's time for me to put in serious hardwork and get things done in a certain amount of time and switch :) Before starting to put in the hardwork, I just want to get things in place so as to not get lost in between the process.
Also, how much time to give to a question? (I know the usual answer and I am NOT looking for that). What I want is ->
I pick up a medium ques, I give around 30 mins - 45 mins to solve it.
- If I am not able to solve, I go to lc discuss & youtube to figure out the approach and try to solve it myself. If still no AC, look for code and understand it and see why I couldn't get AC (Not looking for an answer for this path)
- If I am able to solve in first try or after looking for approach on discuss or yt, How much more time should I spend here trying to research better/different approaches, better code in terms of readability and all? For eg. some graphs questions can be solved using bfs, dfs, union find and what not. If I solve the question using bfs, I always feel like solving using dfs, union find ans all as well. And then I plan to note these approaches down in a notebook for revision. Yes, good old notebooks :')
As of now , this is all. This is more of a discussion & asking for opinions rather than straight forward question & answer. Lets discuss more in the comments :)
I feel like I have wasted a lot of time on leetcode since I didn't do much revision & did like 1 quetion a day or sometimes just the question from previous days as I forgot how i did them.
I want a solid plan now, I know that these plans can get extremely difficult to stick to but consistency won't be a problem once I have a solid plan on paper.
this is my current consistency :)
