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Why 500 LeetCode Problems Changed My Life
How I Prepared for DSA and Secured a Role at Microsoft
If you are a developer, we all know how vital Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) are for cracking the first round of interviews for almost 90% of the companies hiring out there, and I want to quote a very famous saying which I think applies to DSA
“love it or hate it but you can’t ignore it”
I’m sharing my journey of preparing for DSA interviews for companies like Microsoft and other big companies while working despite not preparing for DSA interviews for the past four years.
Initial Story
Towards the end of 2023, I finally decided to switch jobs. The next day, I updated my resume and LinkedIn profile to let recruiters know I was open to new opportunities. To my surprise, a Google recruiter reached out to me the following day about an interview, and she told me the first round would be a DSA round.
I knew I wasn’t ready for a Google-like DSA interview, so I told the recruiter that I needed time to prepare and would schedule the interview when I was ready.
Creating a Plan
When it comes to coding interviews, we all know LeetCode is the go-to platform for practicing DSA. So, I did just that — I logged into my LeetCode account after years and realized I had only solved 50 problems! The last time I switched jobs, I relied more on GeeksforGeeks than LeetCode.
After doing some thorough research, I made a list of the topics I needed to focus on for my interviews.
Different Phases of my preparation
I wanted to keep realistic goals for my preparation as I was already working for a startup and as Senior Engineer there were lot of things on my plate but the goal was to solve easy problems in 15mins, medium problems in 20mins and hard problems in 40–50mins.
