Interview prep

I was struggling to land a swe internship when I was in college. I used to apply to 20+ jobs daily. I heard back from maybe 15% of the jobs I applied to, but I did manage to get 5 interviews, thought unfortunately I bombed all of them.

I was probably preparing the same way as most of you. Do a bunch of leetcode, memorize the patter and hope that I would see a similar question on the interview. Nothing against that, do what you gotta do, but I feel like leetcode these days is just not enough. This past semester I got 3 internship offers, and ended up accepting one of them, and the way I did it was completely different from what I have been doing before. I think that the biggest factor to acing the interview is how you prepare. Doing leetcode only is not going to get you hired, because if that is all you do, then if they ask you a question like "Why does horizontal scaling require a load balancer?" you will blank, and almost certainly won't proceed to the next step.

So for those who are struggling to pass an interview, I would suggest you continue leetcode, but equally (if not more) importantly, practice the actual SWE related questions that you will 100% come across during the job. There are some website you can use, but I personally use one website which is actually the reason how I was able to pass the interviews, but there are a ton of other webs you could use.

Anyway, so long as you stay consistent and study the right tools, you got it.

Hope this helps! :)