The LeetCode Phenomenon

In the winter of 2015, I was working as a Software Engineer at Microsoft and looking for my next Software Engineering job (here’s why), albeit with little success. I remember expressing my frustration to a friend over a velvety Stout beer at a funky bar in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood on a cold, rainy November night. I remember his words clearly:

“So, there is this platform which sort of lets you game the System”

That’s when I first heard about LeetCode- a programming platform which has now become the staple for coding interview preparation. The platform consists of interview style coding questions with an integrated, online IDE which lets you submit and verify the correctness of your solution. It also contains a stack-overflow style discussion forum which lets you post and upvote/downvote solutions to the problems.

Today, if you are interview prepping, you’re going to have to spend some late evenings practicing interview problems on LeetCode. In the words of one of my good friends and colleague:

LeetCode is the great equalizer. Whether you are interviewing for an internship, as a fresh grad just out of college, or as a seasoned Engineering Manager, you’d better be LeetCoding.

I crawled home from the bar that November evening and started practicing problems on LeetCode. Over the next few weeks I practiced several dozen problems. Practicing made a huge difference that time and I eventually landed and accepted an offer from Google in 2016.

I’d never seen anything like LeetCode before. Platforms I’d been using for interview preparation before LeetCode had been passive — with information flowing in one direction (from the author to me). There was the quintessential interview preparation book “Cracking the Coding Interview”. Then there was CareerCup/Glassdoor which had user generated content that could be perused to find commonly asked interview questions. The main shortcomings of these platforms are:

1. They don’t really prepare you for interviews because they diverge from how real-world interviews are conducted
2. They are less engaging (due to a lack of a community)
3. It’s harder to internalize concepts/learning due to a lack of reflection. This is because you are offered one (or zero)…