After 1-on-1 LeetCode Tutoring, my coding efficiency improved, and I Successfully got interviews and entered my dream top-tier tech company

After graduating from my master’s program, I had already been working for over a year. However, due to factors like my position, compensation, and the industry, I wanted to switch to other international companies. Of course, top-tier usually have higher requirements for programming, so I practiced questions in LeetCode and participated in LeetCode-related competitions to strengthen my skills in algorithms and data structures. Although I did gain basic knowledge of these concepts, I still struggled with difficult questions like Hard-type and DP questions. Even after reading answers by others, I still couldn’t fully comprehend them. Therefore, I wanted to find online courses to help me improve. That was when I came across Candice’s courses. My tutor is a Google engineer with experience serving as an interviewer. The 1-on-1 tutoring fit my needs perfectly, although it was slightly expensive.

The trial class at the beginning:

In the trial lesson at the beginning, the tutor gave me a tree-structured question and asked me to find all possible answers where the total number of nodes equaled sum. After giving my answer, the tutor discussed with me if my logic had issues, how to improve my codes and the issue of time complexity. The latter two parts were things I often overlooked, but under the tutor’s guidance, I realized they were also important. In the past, I was happy enough when I solved the question, but now my goal was to write efficient code—this was one of the most valuable things I learned from the tutor as well. I also began paying attention to coding style, which was special for me because everyone codes differently and the same question can be solved differently. For example, some people prefer DFS over BFS; while handling the binary search, some people place indices inside the function, and others outside. These differences made me appreciate the creativity in coding even more. I remember in the session learning DFS; the tutor demonstrated questions in a unique way by using a while loop to implement recursion. This blew my mind because I had never seen people doing it like that before, and I found this so interesting. At the end of each lesson, the tutor would give assignments based on the topic, allowing us to apply the newly learned techniques and solidify our understanding. If encountering any issues, we could bring them up in the next class, and the tutor would address them.

Question types in interviews:

I took a total of seven lessons, one per month. As I began to get new job opportunities, I started to attend interviews as well. During the interviews, I got various types of questions, such as two-pointer techniques, strings, binary search, sorting, and DFS. I noticed that many interviewers focused heavily on code efficiency and logic. Even after completing the code, it might not be accurate. Thus, I had to run test cases and analyze variable behavior line by line to ensure the program was correct. This mirrored discussions about optimization I had with the tutor during the lessons. After gaining experience from these real interviews, I was finally able to enter a large American-based EDA company that I had always dreamed of. For students who are interested in this course, I recommend you have a solid foundation in programming and algorithm knowledge first. This will help you engage more better in coding discussions and avoid communication gaps. I wish everyone success in their future careers and continuous growth!