LeetCode Review : Don’t Waste Your Money

What Is LeetCode?

LeetCode is an online community designed to help software engineers ace their technical interviews at big tech companies. It has a database of hundreds of coding problems, each of which is classified as Easy, Medium, or Hard.

Here are some of the problem topics you’ll find on LeetCode:

Binary search trees	Data structures	Linked lists
Bit manipulation	Algorithms	Brainteasers
Graphs	Dynamic programming	Divide & conquer
Arrays	Queues	Mathematics

LeetCode Features

#1 Multiple Programming Languages

Most questions on LeetCode support multiple programming languages, so you can do them in the languages you know best and avoid unnecessary learning. 

LeetCode currently supports these languages:

C	Python3	Swift
C++	Ruby	Go
C#	MySQL	Scala
Java	MS SQL	Kotlin
JavaScript	Oracle	Rust
Python	Bash	PHP

#2 Community Discussions

Aside from the coding problems itself, the LeetCode community is its most valuable asset. It’s the #1 thing users talk about, and it’s a great resource for getting insight into how others are solving problems and learning from others’ mistakes.

The LeetCode community also has special threads for things like Compensation, where you can post the compensation package you’ve been offered—including signing bonuses, stock options, and everything else—and get feedback and advice from the community.

LeetCode Premium Membership

LeetCode Premium is LeetCode’s paid subscription, which currently costs $35/month or $159/year. It gives users access to premium problems and solutions, a built-in debugger, and interview simulations. 

One thing I particularly like about LeetCode Premium is that it allows you to target specific companies. If you’re preparing for an upcoming interview with Facebook, you can choose to only see questions and mock interviews relevant to Facebook's coding interviews.

The data for this feature is crowdsourced and tends to be fairly accurate.

LeetCode also has monthly coding challenges, which are a fun way to hone your skills quickly.

As I write this, LeetCode Premium offers 1,800+ unique questions, including:

• Customers Who Bought Products A and B but Not C
• Check If a String Is a Valid Sequence from Root to Leaves Path in a Binary Tree
• Find the Start and End Number of Continuous Ranges
• Print Immutable Linked List in Reverse
• Palindrome Removal
• Minimum Time to Build Blocks
• Missing Number In Arithmetic Progression

Is LeetCode Free?

The basic version of LeetCode is free, while LeetCode Premium currently costs $35/month or $159/year.

What's the price of LeetCode Premium in India?

The price of LeetCode Premium in India is the same as everywhere else in the world: $159/year. Whether you buy LeetCode in India, the US, or anywhere else, you'll still pay the same price.

Is LeetCode Premium Worth It?

If all you’re looking for is a way to brush up your coding skills, LeetCode Premium is a reasonable choice. It has a (nearly) endless amount of problems for you to work on, so you can spend months honing your skills.

However, I still can’t recommend LeetCode (Premium or not), because while it is likely to make you a better programmer, LeetCode is not likely land you a job in big tech.

LeetCode’s Biggest Weakness: It’s Only About The Code

Here’s something you probably don’t know about the FAANG hiring process:

The applicants who don’t receive job offers are no less capable than those who do.

The losers, just like the winners, also spent weeks and months honing their knowledge of recursion, data structures, hash tables, stacks, and queues on LeetCode.

The losers also got great grades at the top schools and, on the whole, are excellent programmers.

But what the losers don’t realize is that their programming knowledge had nothing to do with why they weren’t hired.

Because the reality of big tech is that hiring decisions come down to 90% fit and 10% code.

Of course, your code needs to be good to get hired by Google or Facebook—we all know that.

But good code will only get your foot in the door.

There are still several other qualities you need to prove to get an offer.

Here are three of the biggest ones.

#1 Leadership

This is the #1 quality applicants overlook on their journey to getting hired.

Because what recruiters are looking for is not your ability to be a strong junior engineer, but your ability to develop into a strong senior engineer.

They want to know that you have the empathy and the listening skills to lead a team of strangers and that you’re willing to put in the work.

And if you can’t demonstrate that you're a leader in your interview, it doesn’t matter how good your code is—you won’t be getting an offer.

#2 Teamwork & Communication

Teamwork and communication are two other necessary skill sets you won’t learn in LeetCode.

But just like leadership, you must demonstrate your teamwork and communication skills if you expect to get a FAANG offer.

Why?

Because building the world’s best technology is a team endeavor, so if you want to thrive in big tech, you need to prove yourself as a team player.

Don’t overlook the importance of this.

FAANG companies routinely pass on highly competent engineers solely because they haven’t shown that they’ll be productive members of a larger team.

Don’t be the genius engineer that gets overlooked. Be the genius team player that gets the job.

#3 Mastery Over Complexity & Ambiguity

It’s common for technical recruiters at big tech firms to give applicants extremely ambiguous problems to solve—just to see how they handle them.

So if you can’t walk the recruiter through a logical process for solving that problem, they’ll move on to the next applicant before you even leave the room.

To be clear, the sort of ambiguous problems I’m talking about isn’t at all like the problems you face in LeetCode. They’re much more open-ended, and there truly are no right answers for them.

These are the sort of questions you need a guide to help you navigate through. That’s why you need something more comprehensive than LeetCode if you want to give yourself the best chance at getting an offer.

LeetCode vs. Tech Interview Pro

There’s no doubt that LeetCode will help you polish your skills for the coding portion of your interview, but to neglect the rest of the process is just plain irresponsible.

That's why we recommend Tech Interview Pro, a program designed by a former software engineer at Facebook and Google who has compressed years of interview knowledge and experience into a single course.

Here are just a few of the reasons we recommend Tech Interview Pro over LeetCode.

#1 A Comprehensive Approach

Tech Interview Pro will coach you on all aspects of the technical interview, not just your coding skills. And as more FAANG recruiters come forward and stress the importance of soft skills and leadership qualities in their hiring decisions, you can’t afford to overlook the human side of the hiring process any longer. 

Here’s a breakdown of Tech Interview Pro, with the non-technical modules bolded:

1. Understanding The Interview Process
2. Four Axes of the Interview
   1. Coding
   2. Data Structures & Algorithms
   3. Systems Design
   4. Communication
3. Interviewing Masterclass
4. Data Structures & Algorithms
5. 100+ Coding Sessions
6. The Mock Interview
7. Systems Design
8. Transitioning Careers
9. Negotiating & Accepting Your Offer

As you can see, there’s more programming practice in there than you’ll ever get through, but the real value comes in the non-technical modules: that’s how you’ll set yourself apart from everyone else who's just focused on LeetCode.

You can get more detail on each of these nine modules in our in-depth Tech Interview Pro review.

#2 Private Facebook Group

The Tech Interview Pro private Facebook group is a goldmine of opportunity.

With over 1,500 past students in there posting hundreds of times per month, it’s an invaluable resource for getting immediate feedback on your interviews and offers, and for meeting other engineers who have successfully leaped FAANG and other tech firms. 

Here are some of the posts by past Tech Interview Pro students:

#3 Run By Industry Insiders

Tech Interview Pro is run by an industry veteran who has reverse-engineered the hiring process to give you the best chance of success:

• TechLead (Patrick Shyu) has grown his websites to millions of users, spent his recent years working at Facebook and Google, and has conducted over 100 technical interviews for Google.

If there’s anyone who knows how to get a job at FAANG, it’s this guy.

#4 Bi-Weekly Q&A Sessions

Every two weeks, TechLead will conduct a live Q&A session for all Tech Interview Pro students. The Q&A sessions normally last for about an hour, and they cover a lot of ground. 

Some sample questions you might want to ask in the Q&A sessions include:

• I want to get hired at Amazon. How do I get started?
• I have an upcoming phone screening on Facebook. What should I be thinking about?
• I have an upcoming interview at Microsoft. How should I prepare?
• I didn’t get the internship I wanted at Google. What should I work on over the next 6 months to ensure I get the next one?

Every Q&A session is recorded, so as soon as you join Tech Interview Pro, you’ll gain access to all previous Q&A sessions, too.

The best part about the Q&A sessions is that you can get specific feedback for your scenario, which can be incredibly valuable. Make sure to tune in every two weeks! 

#5 Resume Reviews

TechLead will personally review your resume and help you tailor it for the position and the company you’re pursuing. Your resume will probably be a recruiter’s first interaction with you, so having it check all the right boxes is key. 

#6 Lifetime Access

Every student gets lifetime access to everything within Tech Interview Pro: new video lessons as they’re added, the private Facebook group, all of the live Q&A sessions, and everything else.

So not only will you be able to leverage the course to get this job, but you can use it to get your next job 2, 5, or 10 years down the road, too.

In Summary

LeetCode is a good tool for polishing your programming skills. But because everyone is doing LeetCode—and big tech recruiters know it—mastering LeetCode problems isn’t enough to land the job you want.

If you want to get ahead of your peers and give yourself the best shot at getting a big tech job offer, you’re going to need a better edge. We recommend setting yourself apart from the rest of the job market with Tech Interview Pro.