# Interview success depends partly on which question you get

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/interview-success-depends-partly-on-which-question-you-get/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: NeetCode · NeetCode is a coding interview prep creator.
- Host: [Ryan Peterman](https://realalpha.app/people/ryan-peterman/) · Host, The Peterman Pod · Went from new grad to staff engineer at Instagram in three years.
- Show: The Peterman Pod
- Episode: [Neetcode: Google vs Amazon, Programming Interviews, Quitting Big Tech](https://realalpha.app/v/K15dND_Kfvg/), Oct 5, 2026
- Moment: 8:04 to 11:26 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/interview-success-depends-partly-on-which-question-you-get/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/K15dND_Kfvg/?t=484

## Quote

> “the people who are passing their interviews it's not that like they're dumb like **they are competent** and they're just as good as like anybody else”
> — NeetCode at [9:09](https://realalpha.app/v/K15dND_Kfvg/?t=549) · The Peterman Pod

## Takeaways

1. Know the core patterns before chasing obscure hard problems.
2. Strong candidates can fail when they get a question they can’t solve.
3. Competitive programming can sit far beyond interview-level LeetCode.

## About this segment

NeetCode says candidates don’t need to master every hard problem: knowing core patterns can be enough, and interview outcomes vary with the question. A college contest shows how wide the skill gap can be.

From “Neetcode: Google vs Amazon, Programming Interviews, Quitting Big Tech”, Oct 5, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/K15dND_Kfvg/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[8:09](https://realalpha.app/v/K15dND_Kfvg/?t=489) This is my mental model is there's leak code is actually just the beginning. And leak code easies, you're just barely doing it. Leak code mediums, you get jobs. Leak code hards, you're a bit better. But you can go past that many standard deviations into code forces. And so where where do you think roughly uh someone who can pass interviews decently well let's say they can do leak code mediums pretty well where does that place you in the percentile of all elos did you say yeah so that's really i guess kind of funny and i don't know how people are going to feel about this because i've i talked to a lot of people and i've spoken to a lot of people over the last few years and some people have the mentality that like if you want to get a job at big tech today most of them are still doing some variation of like leak code they think that

[9:03](https://realalpha.app/v/K15dND_Kfvg/?t=543) they need to like be able to do the hardest questions like super hards and if they failed their interview it's just because they weren't able to do all the leak code hards and somebody else did unfortunately that's not what usually happens the people who are passing their interviews it's not that like they're dumb like they are competent and they're just as good as like anybody else but most likely they were just asked a question that they were able to answer and the other person just wasn't and um i mean that's provided you meet like some bar of like okay you kind of know like the core patterns that you'd be able to solve a question you've already seen before and stuff like that um so i think unfortunately like the answer is like it's wider than you think there isn't like an average i think you could be pretty like low on that end

[9:47](https://realalpha.app/v/K15dND_Kfvg/?t=587) and still pass interviews you could be pretty high and fail some interviews but if you're like really high like probably you won't fail most of them because it's like a numbers game at that point but i think the average is lower than a lot of people think i think if you can solve like some leak code mediums like a third of leak code mediums you have a pretty good chance i think of like passing in an interview one story that really showed me how big the gaps are is uh this was in college google hosted some event where they invited all these colleges to bring their you know a team to go and compete in this set of puzzles and one of the rounds was just pure competitive programming the other ones were like word association and some other things but then the the competitive programming one my team was full of people that were all stacked in terms of

[10:44](https://realalpha.app/v/K15dND_Kfvg/?t=644) getting jobs like lead code was no problem for them but these problems were so hard there I think there was like 13 and and no one got any of them and then one of the guys on our team was he was a little bit he was much better than all of us and he carried us and he did like three problems out of like the 13 but the crazy thing is there's another college there it was caltech they they did all 13 and they just destroyed us damn so like you know there are there are levels to this stuff it's really crazy so i i interviewed someone who's a complexity theorist i want to know so