Neetcode: Google vs Amazon, Programming Interviews, Quitting Big Tech

NeetCodethat they can. But there are other environments, I think, that are like super cutthroat. And it's not people trying to do their best. It's like people, you can tell people are not like rooting for each other. Like people are, I wouldn't say they're trying to like screw each other over. I

wasn't really there long enough to judge that. But you can tell people are not friendly. Like there were some like meetings, like icebreakers that we had. And like nobody, like all, it was like 10 people, like five of us were like new grads. Literally, we all had joined within the first month. The other half were like super burnt out, experienced people like mid-level and seniors and stuff. And they were just like very unhappy. And that like spreads pretty quickly to the rest of the team. And like I said, like I think every other new grad on the team probably survived that experience. Like I didn't really keep in touch with them. I don't think they probably got pipped or whatever but it was clearly like most people left that team i think like within a year like i have them all added on linkedin so they were not happy there either i don't think what gave you the confidence to just quit your job so quickly yeah i think it was like a very uncharacteristic thing of me i think i was like 22 and like it's so weird because right before i had started that job i was like i'm on top of the world like i'm like everything is going so well like i have like i was i was broken now i have like a job and like okay like it might be

stressful but like i'll have it for the rest of my life or maybe i'll switch to another job like it's so crazy like how quickly like i was like literally on the moon and then it all just like plummeted overnight like it was like my first day my manager's like okay like the team's a little burnt out trying not to ask too many questions and so i'm just like okay Okay. I'm like, whoa, what's going on? It's like a horror movie. It keeps getting worse and worse. But yeah, anyways. Did you have to do LeetCode to get that job? Yeah. The funny thing is, I don't know if I should say this, but it's been like seven years at this point. The LeetCode questions for Amazon were actually surprisingly easy. People always say that you can cheat now. At that point, I don't remember the exact question. It was like some variation of twosome and questions that really weren't that difficult um they really grill you on the leadership principles though and i think it's important to be at least a little bit honest with that because i think like i lied for every single question for that like because it's like a personality test it's like okay if you're in this situation what would you do and i know what they're looking for like they're looking for like the personality type who has like high agency like

they're not really scared they're gonna like they're gonna take risks and they're gonna just you know they're gonna show up and stuff and so i gave answers like that but that's really not my personality it's like very like the opposite where like i'm very risk averse and like i try not to like mess things up and like i take initiative but at amazon like they want like really high initiative where like you're on your first day you're just like making decisions so it took some like getting used to well i ask is when i when i was doing recruitment i remember this is a long time ago Amazon they did some weird thing where they had like this group SAT at my college where they sat down hundreds of us and gave us these it's a sequence of logic puzzles basically it would be something like I mean this makes it this makes it sound really trivial but it'd be like multiple choice and be like you know a b c d colon and then it'd be like you know uh e f g blank think what's the remaining because just you know continue the pattern kind of stuff i think i had something like that actually it was like an online thing it was like one section of it though you said you weren't good at leak code to begin with and i mean today like let's say i don't know

how practiced you are right now if i gave you the hardest leak code hard could you solve it no problem probably not and i don't i don't think i was ever actually that good like because leak code is like such a big spectrum where it's like as you get better most people can't really tell the difference between like a good engineer and like a suit like a 10x engineer and that's like the level like that most people i think see like leak code where like somebody who's really really good at leak code hards like they're just indistinguishable but there's like there's other platforms like code forces i think is like the other big one where it's like the distribution is really like known because you'll be like on the completely other end of like somebody else who's better than you but you might be the same like on the leak code spectrum as they are but like on a different platform it's much wider but I guess to answer your question yeah I'm not I'm like decent still surprisingly like if you do something for years it's actually hard to forget it and I just kept making videos for years even when I didn't need to so like I'm pretty like practice with like the core patterns I could look at a problem and like tell you like what the

solution might be but it'd be harder to like actually like hand code it up especially now that i feel like most people aren't like hand typing code anymore including myself so yeah it probably be tough what percent of like we could mediums could you do right now if i just test you right now say you know do this one or whatever i mean i'd be curious but i i not too not all of them for sure i i think for the vast majority of them i could probably at least tell you like what the solution would be or like roughly like the pattern um do you want to do a leak code yeah we can try it so i was genuinely curious to see how good he was at leetcode and so we actually did do an impromptu leetcode whiteboarding session where i asked him nothing but leetcode hards and he had no time to prepare if you're curious to see how he did i uploaded it to my youtube channel separately Because it didn't fit in the podcast. Anyways, back to the original conversation.

You mentioned the code forces. I think they have an ELO system in that, right? Right. 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 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

NeetCodeelse 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 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

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 clearly competitive programmers that's above leak coding where's complexity theory in all on all this stuff right i feel like to do something and to like learn it or to just do anything the the best way to do it is to like actually do it and so like if you're training like another skill it doesn't really work it out like the same way i guess to use like an analogy even with like muscles like i feel like i could be wrong about this but if you're doing like a leg press machine it doesn't actually help you that much for your squat like you'd think it would because it's like the exact same muscle but for some reason it actually doesn't it'll make like a very small

difference and i think that's how A lot of life works. If you're like preparing like for competitive programming specifically you'll get pretty good at that but maybe like your communication will suck during like the actual interview or you'll miss something else. In my case I did a lot of videos and I think that actually doesn't make you that much better at solving the problems at a certain point because it's more of a distraction because it's like if you if you take like four hours to make a video most of that is spent making the video and trying to understand like somebody else's perspective rather than making yourself better.

So if I had to guess, I don't think the complexity theorists are probably as good under time constraints and typing as fast as they can, but maybe for really hard problems, they could probably, I don't know, they've probably just seen way more stuff so they can kind of recall something like, okay, maybe this algorithm or this technique will work on this problem or something. Because a lot of them get really, really elaborate at that level where you need some really crazy, obscure algorithm you couldn't have possibly heard of. There's this idea, I think this was true throughout when I was learning math and, you know, various things in school.

This is this idea of, like, deriving something when you need it and then memorization. In this hierarchy, deriving it is the true intelligence. That's where you really, you know, you come up into the math. You don't know the formulas, but you're good with math and you can figure it out on the fly. what percent of performance in leak code do you think is is just people memorizing the solutions versus you know deriving things when they hear the the question if i had to guess and even just

NeetCodefrom like speaking with people i'd say like at least 90 it's people just kind of memorizing one way or another which i think is fine because if you look at like the entire problem of like

interview preparation there's a lot to cover and you just can't like possibly do it yourself but the other thing I will say is that you can't just memorize you do have to like and this is what makes it really hard because you have to cover a lot of stuff but at the same time you have to like build at least some of the skills to like understand what's going on so you're not just like blindly memorizing or you're not like asking yourself okay should I do like DFS or BFS like you should still have like some like high level understanding and that's really hard i think um like actually like covering things in like a smart way i guess since we're talking about this memorization versus deriving and you've taught so many people leak code is leak code an accurate assessment of intelligence i think definitely not i think there's components to it i think like is the sat like a sign of intelligence i think not really but it's a sign of like a lot of things that correlate with it and it like some subset of it surely isn't intelligence because it's not like a dog could like pass those tests or like do an elite code problem or something it's like yes but i think it's i don't know i think people get like caught up on that because

then they've like they see some people doing well and some people aren't and they're like well it just must be intelligence or something else like maybe partially but i think that's it's not just that like i'm just saying this just to say it but i actually believe it now like after meeting so many people and like seeing so much stuff i'm sure you've seen so many like high performing people and you've spoken to a lot of like guests and stuff i feel like the the number one thing the the number one bottleneck is usually like some level of enjoyment or passion or work ethic or just something of that nature where like somebody keeps doing something because i don't think i really did anything that special all i did was just made a lot of leak code videos when most people wouldn't have been willing to do that or just not had the time to do that and i think that's what most things boil down to like a lot of the like really smart people that you have uh on the podcasts i think they just enjoyed what they did and then just kept doing it and then built their life around that and um then it just becomes that i think the people usually in terms of leak code they're usually people that either did a lot of math or programming or some kind of like math club when they were kids

like to get to a certain level like the code forces level and stuff you just have to have done that since you were a kid like if you're a chess player like you have to just start early what kept you making these leak code videos for so long because you have hundreds of them the one thing i guess i didn't like about school and for the most part i liked school but i always thought that like the computer science classes especially especially like every time we would get to a part where it's like starting to get really interesting like whether it's databases or like ml or something else like you get to the end of the class and you do like your random project or whatever and then you you kind of know like the core stuff about that class and then that's the part where i want to like go 10 times deeper i just want to like do one thing and then do it really really well i think that's why i wasn't like in terms of like being the best developer i could be i think i'm better at like other things than than that and um i i think I think when I got to leak code, I just like enjoyed that.

And I felt productive as I was doing it, even though like it really wasn't on paper. I was like making a video, getting like 50 views and I was enjoying that. But it wasn't like I was ever going to like make a living off of this or anything. So I just kept doing it just because I was like stubborn and I enjoyed it. And I was I thought I was like helping people as well. So I just stuck with it. you had this one video i remember it was like maybe some people should just give up or what was that the that was the title yeah it was like maybe some people should just give up and yeah i guess a question to you is do you think that anyone could be good at lee code are some people inherently not able to do it i think the vast majority of people especially anybody who like is a programmer and likes programming i think they could get to that point i think the uh i mean they might feel like they're not smart enough and like they might feel that like many steps along the way and i think that'll probably like burn them out before they can like get to that point because it's not like any everyone wants to do everything like if they if they want to like pass their interviews or for whatever reason they need to i think they could probably

do that but um i think most people will find like that there are other like most people decide for whatever reason that there are better ways to spend their time like most people will start the code grind and then give up they're like okay screw this like i'm gonna get a job another way i'm gonna network like i'm not i'm not about to like do a 300 leak code problems and that's perfectly fine i think but yeah well so when you say that maybe some people should just give up what's your your take on okay um yeah i i don't like i don't recommend anybody to give up i really

NeetCodedon't i swear i like it for me like i want the opposite i really do like i want people to like push themselves and to be like the best that they can be and i don't know i guess it's just that

like the reason i made that video i guess is like there's a certain attitude that i feel like it just really like turns you off like sometimes you'll see it in school especially like early school where like half the class like is paying attention and half the class just doesn't really care and that's fine um but it's like i don't know it's like the more seriously you take something and you spend like a bunch of time like making this video explaining all these parts and somebody asks you a question that like you know they could have answered it just makes me like disappointed just makes me think like like i know you're better than this like like you can like you you can figure it out yourself like you can like you're smarter like you're too smart to like give up that early like that's like how i feel but obviously like the words that i said and like when i like say it a certain way like i recognize that people aren't going to interpret it that way so i have to live with that but i think i had a lot of people i'd say like 95 of people actually like liked that video like clicked like on that video which was surprising to me most people that like reached out or commented they said that hey like i needed to hear this this was like a wake up call and i

had somebody like message. Me before they were like, Microsoft intern interview, and they're like, hey, I really needed this. I'm going to lock in for the next couple of weeks. And I was like, okay, I guess I'll leave that video up because at least somebody got something out of it. I see. So the energy in that is, it's like a disappointed teacher. Yeah. Because why would I make videos that are teaching people and then on the same side, tell people that they should give up and not do this? It doesn't make sense and yeah so like i said i can live with like what i said it wasn't the nicest thing if i could do it over again probably whatever i think like the only thing i said in that that video though i think that was actually offensive is that i can't believe somebody would ask me this dumb and i said another word after that and i said question that's that's literally the worst thing i said i didn't make it personal with that person i didn't call anybody like not smart enough for anything but yeah anyway i'll stop i'll stop there before i like do more reputational damage when when you when you were recording this uh you know video because well i i like the video by the way but when i saw the packaging and you know it was like this unhinged thing that you had dropped

were you were you worried at all on your side because you you got to record it watch it over and click send right so yeah i watched that video a couple times actually because i was like am i sure but like sometimes i'm just like i think when i made that video if i could like somehow find a way to harness that energy i'd have so many viral videos by now but i really can't like i'll just like every like few months i'll just get like mad about something and just like make a rant video but i really wasn't planning it like that video like when i when i look back at it it was just a really long like ramble where i went off on like five different tangents to make my point i'm like you know if i was trying to make a viral video this could be a little bit like better open ai anthropic cursor and versell all use this product to make their lives better and the problem it solves is when you're building sas or an ai product and you want to sell to other companies there's all these requirements you need to meet there's sso there's skim there's rback there's audit logs these are all things that take time to integrate but aren't the main focus of your app. WorkOS is an API layer that lets you meet all of these requirements in just a few lines of

code. So let's say you have a new SaaS product and you want to sell to other companies. WorkOS will solve all of these critical feature gaps for you. You can check them out at workos.com to learn more and get started. And I appreciate them for supporting my work and sponsoring this podcast. In your career path, I mean, you went to Amazon, you instantly quit and you started making these videos right you you keep creating these videos and later you get your you know your quote-unquote dream job yeah so when I was making the videos I was hoping that somebody would like give me a job interview at some point and I'd like ace it it took a long time it took like almost a year and then it just happened to be Google and I was like you know I kind of would have actually preferred somebody else so that the interview would be a little bit easier but I was like okay well like I guess like here goes and the interview itself I wasn't very nervous for for whatever reason i guess i just prepared so much but um and then getting into google it pretty much like you said it was like my dream job i think a lot of people like young college students they see like a tech company like that and like once you're in like you feel like you know you've made it

and that's definitely how i felt and i was making like pretty good money i was up in uh here in seattle and um like everything was going well like my team was really nice it was kind of the opposite of amazon where like everybody is like super friendly and like willing to help and the work was I would say fine like it was technical at least but it wasn't the most interesting it was a lot of like processes and bureaucracies so that was kind of boring um but um then I I got to a point where I felt like I could actually like go full time into like the YouTube neat code thing. And that was pretty risk averse. Like I probably could have done it actually a lot sooner. And yeah, I really enjoyed my time at Google, but it was just something that I felt like I enjoyed like algorithms and stuff more. And it was an opportunity that wasn't going to like be there forever. So I just wanted to take it. But I could have definitely seen myself working in big tech my whole life. A lot of people I talked to, they don't feel that way.

A lot of people are like, I'm just here like until I don't have to be here anymore for how many ever years that is. But for me, I was pretty happy just like doing something technical my whole life. You mentioned that some like Google's interviews maybe were a certain level of hardness in LeetCode. If you were to come up with a tier list of like the just purely LeetCode. So purely which companies ask the hardest LeetCode questions. And if you pass that bar, you must be pretty great at LeetCode. What's your tier list? I think the labs ask pretty tough questions these days, like OpenAI and Anthropic.

But they're not exactly like the traditional LeetCode format. They're a lot different. But yeah, I think it usually just comes down to the supply and demand. How many people are trying to get into that company and how many roles does that company actually try to fill? I feel like the smaller companies are usually harder. You said OpenAI Anthropic's interview process is a little different. How does OpenAI and Anthropic do their coding interviews? Yeah, I've heard a lot of mixed things. Like recently what I've heard is that definitely like knowledge of data structures and algorithms will be pretty helpful.

Like it's pretty hard to get through it without that. But it's definitely not like a leak code interview is what they would say. it's that like there might be components of like an algorithm or like multiple files or like you're just given like a problem and you kind of have to like reason through it some of them mentioned that like they have ai access but i think for anthropic it's not and i think the most recent person i asked for open ai also said that they don't have ai access which is really interesting to me i think like interviews are just kind of really random lately i'm trying to figure out like where this is going but it's really impossible like i thought it was going to be ai assisted but like all these companies are still like figuring it out as they go so it's it's been interesting to watch you went to google and you liked it but sounds like you you left because you wanted to pursue full-time like it wasn't like you were running from something you were going towards lee code and content creation i i remember back in the day you were faceless were you nervous at all to post your your face yeah no it's it's kind of funny i guess because it's been six years now since i like made the

youtube channel and for the first three years i think i was faceless and like roughly three years ago this month i think is when i did it and so now i've had like half and half and i think um i think it's been great because i've gotten to like actually be like a person and after I did that had a lot of people like reach out to me they're like hey like I didn't know like you're the guy who did that like hey like let me know if you're ever in town blah blah blah and um I guess it was cool to like actually like meet people and I don't know just meet people I guess that you can like relate to like content creators like we met as well yeah I mean so there's a part of me I guess that kind of liked the faceless version as well because you just get to be like really introverted and just like not have to like ever deal with people but people are pretty nice to me and i i don't have any regrets about that once in a while like i'll be out and somebody will like recognize me and if i'm with a friend it's like you can kind of like show off or act like you're a big deal but for the most part i don't know i just yeah it's been fun meeting like other nerds and stuff how's your experience quitting google and doing your own

thing full-time i think in my case um i really enjoyed what i was doing so it was a lot easier for me. I have a lot of people reach out that Like they don't really enjoy their jobs, but they don't really know what else they want to do either. I think that's a lot harder. For me, it was just that I liked algorithms and doing things around that, whether it was like building my site or making YouTube videos. And I just kind of leaned into that. And that's been working out for the past few years. And more recently, I've been trying to like expand into other areas and stuff.

NeetCodeBut I guess what I've learned is that like, I guess passion really matters. and it's like if you're passionate about one thing that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be passionate about everything but um yeah i think it's i've definitely had no regrets i think it's

been a success for the most part um but yeah it's not it's not like perfect i wouldn't reckon necessarily recommend like every person out there needs to quit their job or do their own side hustle or whatever i don't like buy into a lot of that stuff do you ever miss google a lot like i miss like I can afford food now but I still miss the free food for some reason I don't know if you had that experience because they really like make it like in a way that you'd miss it if you weren't there like especially the free coffee and stuff because I'd always get like a latte um but anyways but um yeah I miss um I mean the one thing I miss is the culture because I could like add my neat code and like I could hire a bunch of people and kind of create my own culture and it's really nice that you have like the freedom to do that but i'm not really like a culture builder i'm more of like a person that just does things or solves problems or whatever like i don't consider myself a manager but i've had to do that a lot the last couple years and it's it's been a learning experience you mentioned what you miss about google but what is it that you hated most about working at google that's a good question i think it's just

really slow like urgency and like speed doesn't seem to matter which is fine I guess the reason that's a problem because some people would see that and think like oh it's like a work-life balance paradise you can kind of just chill and do whatever you want which is which is true because there's that side to it but the other side is that like if you're ambitious or you're trying to like get your project delivered sooner or you're trying to get promoted or just anything you're gonna be fighting against like all that like work-life balance culture because you're trying to get somebody else to do something and like you don't want to like put too much pressure on them you don't want to like mess with their work-life balance because then they're going to mess with yours and like yeah it was just really slow if you're a technical person you you want to be there because they're not going to probably at google like cut too many corners but sometimes you wish they would because it just goes so slow and like like they prioritize processes over actually like making a like an impact for like a customer like getting a project delivered it's It's just like, yeah, they care too much, I think, about like what the engineers think and like what they feel rather than like actually trying to serve like customers.

So it's like the opposite of Amazon, I'd say, in that respect. What's the top technical book recommendation for software engineers? Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I guess I really liked DDIA, Designing Data Intensive Applications. I just spoke with somebody a month ago and they were telling me that they did read through it, but for them, like most of it didn't really stick. and I think that's fair actually I think for most people it wouldn't stick but I think my brain is just kind of like wired a different way where like rather than like I think most people learn by like getting an introduction to like a high-level topic and then like digging deeper into that but for me I like understanding like the actual like building blocks of something and that'll like help me understand like the higher level stuff so like for example like why did like data warehouses use like a completely different query engine than like a actual transactional database I mean most people don't need to know and it doesn't really matter most of the time so you probably won't remember like even if you did learn it but like there happens to be like the way the data is actually assembled and for certain query patterns blah blah blah like these things do matter and now

like the reason I say it's a good book based on that isn't because like you'll necessarily take those exact details and then apply them. Apply them to like some problem, but it like changes the way your brain thinks about things. Like the same way learning algorithms will help you think about things differently. Understanding like just general like computer science problems and distributed systems and all that stuff. For me, at least, like I noticed a lot of like parallels and stuff. Like when I'm reading DDIA, practically every single chapter, I can like find at least like a few leak code problems that like can like help explain like certain things or like help me understand certain things.

And so in that way, it's been useful for me, but I wouldn't necessarily say for everybody it would be. Last question is, if you go back to your younger self when you just graduated college and give yourself some advice, what would you say? Definitely focus a little bit more on what you enjoy, because my priority at that point was just trying to get like some job that I would reasonably enjoy. And I thought like anything technical will be fine. And then so like as I was doing computer science, I started learning a lot about like web development because I saw people talking about that online and learning React.

But I think probably my career would have been just as well, if not better, had I done something like really random and obscure, like operating systems or databases or something, which I would have enjoyed a lot more. And I think I probably would have been better at it than I was at web development, even though people say like web dev or just like building apps is like the easy thing. i feel like it's not really easy if it's like boring to you and to me it was pretty boring so um yeah like people say the same thing about leak code like it's hard but for me it was i guess easy because i just enjoyed it so yeah i'd say yeah i think a lot of people are asking that question now and so i would just say that like try to enjoy it at least a little bit awesome well thanks so much for your time neat i really appreciate it yeah appreciate it yeah hey thank you for watching this podcast if you liked it and you want to see the show grow please support with a comment or a like also if you have any recommendations for people you want me to bring on please drop a comment guests like barbara liskov mike stonebreaker mark brooker these were all people that i brought on because someone left a comment on another note aside from

the podcast i'm working on building the ergonomic keyboard that i wish existed here's a glance at the prototype it's a split keyboard so there's two sides this is in the case but yeah we launched on kickstarter and we hit our goal within eight hours of launching i really appreciate it if you were one of the people who grabbed one of the early units we're now working on the long journey of building the tooling now and so if you still want to pick one up i've left the late pledges open on kickstarter so you can grab one there i'll put a link in the description thank you again for watching the podcast and i'll see you in the next episode