Most prep guides assume you’re aiming at FAANG. Most students aren’t. Here’s what to actually grind for the tier you’re interviewing at, and what to safely skip.
Pick your target tier first. Don’t over-prep for FAANG if you don’t want to work at FAANG.
Hard-mode bar. Plan for 250+ LeetCode + system design + behavioral. 3-4 month grind if starting cold.
Bar
Patterns to lock in
Real bar but human. 100-150 LeetCode + 1 design round + behavioral. 2-3 months if starting from intermediate.
Bar
Patterns to lock in
More well-rounded. Project work and code-quality round > LeetCode. ~30 LeetCode for warm-up, lots of takehomes.
Bar
Patterns to lock in
For someone starting at intermediate. Compress to 6 weeks if your foundations are strong; stretch to 16 if cold.
Arrays, strings, hash maps, two pointers. Solve 30 Easys to remember syntax + warm muscle memory.
BFS, DFS, level-order, recursion. Solve 25 Mediums. The pattern recognition matters more than the code.
Climbing stairs → coin change → knapsack → LIS → LCS. Hardest week. Plan for slowness.
Tries, union-find, monotonic stack, heap. ~30 Mediums + 5 Hards. By now you can read most LeetCode discussions.
Pramp, Interviewing.io, or pair with a friend. Time-box to 45 min. System design once a week.
LeetCode company tags. Practice 2-3 hardest. Polish 4-5 STAR stories. Sleep more.
Don't grind 500+ problems
After ~150 quality problems with deliberate review, you're getting diminishing returns. Spend the time on system design, mocks, and behavioral instead.
Quality > quantity by a lot
20 problems where you understand WHY > 100 where you copied a solution. Always do the "what did I learn" 1-line note after each problem.
Mock interviews are 80% of the gap
You can solve in your IDE in silence. Can you solve while talking, on a whiteboard / shared editor, with someone watching? That's the actual interview. Mock 10+ times before you interview for real.
System design is mandatory at every tier
Even Tier 3 asks something. Read "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" intro chapters. Watch 5 system design YouTube videos. You need pattern vocabulary, not deep expertise.
Behavioral kills more candidates than code
You might solve the algo and still lose. Write 6 STAR stories: a failure, a conflict, a leadership moment, a technical decision, a customer/user moment, a learning moment. Practice them spoken.
More resources don’t help. Pick one path and finish it.
Blind 75
75 problems hitting every major pattern. Best ROI on the internet.
NeetCode 150
Better-organized version of Blind 75 with solutions and patterns.
Pramp
Free peer mock interviews. The closest thing to real practice.
System Design Primer
Open-source crash course. Read it cover to cover at least once.