May 7, 2025 -

What are the good alternatives to LC in terms of interview preparation with the same effectiveness but not so overwhelming?

I found hack2hire, but they seem to have little number of problems in total... what else? codility?

February 15, 2022 -

So far I haven’t used a service like leet code. But from what I read that even the simple problems are fairly difficult. My question is if there is an alternative I could start out with that isn’t as difficult to start out with.

I’m not opposed to Leetcode, But don’t want to start out as frustrated.

October 17, 2023 -

In school, I learned math best by doing TONS of problems. I am looking for good resources that will allow me to do the same thing as I practice DSA. The ideal platform would have problems that are easier than/about the same as Leetcode easys and can be filtered by topic.

So far, the only thing I have found is GeeksforGeeks. It lets me filter by Basic and also choose different data structures or techniques to filter by.

Any other suggestions?

March 27, 2025 -

So I am a career switcher, trying to find a Junior SWE position in this god awful market, and am trying to prepare for possible technical interviews. I have found this task rather daunting because the only prominent services for interview practice seem to be Hackerrank and Leetcode. These two services are god awful because every exercise is made unreasonably difficult; if a question doesnt require some advanced mathmatical or scientific background to even understand the problem statement, it requires you to use some ridiculously roundabout method to solve the problem, and will mark the answer wrong if you use a simpler, more practical method. I know from experience completing technical interviews that decent employers dont employ questions like these when interviewing Juniors, and I know from my experience interning on a development team that the ability to solve brain teaser problems is irrelevant to a Junior SWE's Job.

The kinds of problems I want to practice would be something like "create a program that checks if a string is a palindrome" or "create a program that checks which items in an array of strings are represented more than once" (these are actual questions I was given during a technical interview for a Junior SWE position). Can anyone reccomend a book or website that focuses on problems at or around this level?

October 23, 2023 -

Rather than running your code against 100 different test cases and failing you if you miss 1, is there a platform that can use AI to tell you if you have the correct approach that covers the general case and then a couple of the more common edge cases? I feel like that would more useful and more in line with a standard white board interview.

June 1, 2025 -

Hi, I'm looking for an app or site like sololearn but only for algorithms and data structures.i was thinking about solving leetcodes but I feel like a dumb ass since I mix up algorithms and can't code that well since I don't practice that much. I'd be grateful for your advices.

August 3, 2024 -

Hi R

I was looking into LeetCode and it seems the solutions they have there are from “the community”, which has no guarantee that the answers are actually the best solution or even that they are correct.

I’m looking for an alternative platform that also has good challenges, ones that are actually similar to real interview problemas, but that have the “official” resolution explanation, considering the best answer to the problem.

Please, would anyone have any recommendations?

Thank you

January 24, 2020 -

I want to practice and strengthen my programming/problem solving skills. I’ve heard about Leetcode and how many people recommend it, but it’s not free. Does anyone know any free alternatives that I can try out?

March 14, 2025 -

Looking for some advice from some of the more tenured engineers on here.

I just started interviewing new grads where I work, and want to ask some coding questions that are more realistic to what we do daily as software engineers.

One interview I’m assigned to is to ask a data structures / algorithm question but don’t want to ask some cookie cutter leetcode problem like reversing a linked list. Anyone have any creative questions they asked which kind of steers away from the whole leetcode thing? Trying to make the interview experience better for the candidate (and myself because i don’t like LC either)

Thanks in advance!

July 7, 2024 -

I have been facing trouble with leet code problems and it's frustrating me. I studied and practiced Python from books and online tutorials and couple of my friends suggested me to try LeetCode but now I feel like I'm trying to jump on top of the building without taking the stairs. Please suggests me as to how to progress? Thanks in adv.

February 9, 2023 -

I am a Software Engineer in the industry for 7 years! Unlike the average individual, I actually like leetcode even though it has no correlation with job performance. It just satisfies my itch of solving problems and having a fast feedback loop: sort of like crossword or sudoku or math puzzles pr

I also like programming languages and like learning exotic languages. Are there sites that are more expansive than leetcode: test file io, or some regex parsing, or date time math or interacting with csv, json, concurrency or dealing with binary data. These will help me learn the capabilities of a new language much faster than just reading a book on the language.

I usually do projects but was wondering if there was something more expansive than leetcode with an autograder that tests some of the things I mentioned. This will satisfy the puzzle itch

August 8, 2023 -

Hey 20F here and in my 3rd year. I’m currently grinding Leetcode for internship. My question is would it be worth it to get Leetcode premium? I think it’s too pricey so I’m looking for an alternative. Also where do you guys study for specific questions for specific companies?

November 30, 2021 -

I'm only a freshman and started leetcoding and recently past 100 questions. I will keep doing these for a long time but I think there might be some better stuff to do rather than grinding for 4 years everyday. My grades are good

October 13, 2021 -

Any free websites like Leetcode where I can practice data engineering problems in python/sql?

I have a DE job and looking to sharpen my coding chops but would rather not pay if I can!

May 15, 2020 -

I'm glad leetcode style questions are prominent. If you haven't gone to a top school and you have no/little experience there'd be no other way to get into top tech companies like Google and Facebook. Leetcode really levels the playing field in that respect. There's still the issue of getting past the resume review stage and getting to the interview. Once you're there though it's all about your data structures and algorithms knowledge.

It's sure benefitted me at least. I graduated from a no-name university in the middle east at the end of 2016 with a 2.6 GPA. Without the culture of asking leetcode style questions I probably would never have gotten into Facebook or at Amazon where i currently am.

I think that without algorithm questions, hire/no-hire decisions would give more weight where you've worked, what schools you went to, how well you build rapport with the interviewer etc. similar to some other industries (like law I think). In tech those things only matter for getting to the interview.

Basically the current tech interview culture makes it easy for anyone to break it's helped break into the top tech companies (FANG/big-4/whatever) and I think most engineers with enough time on their hands can probably do so if they want to.

May 21, 2022 -

I read that Websites like leetcode aren't representative of the type of problems that one will face in a day to day work environment. What would be a more useful way to practice coding and problem solving then?

June 15, 2018 -

So I have just started learning the basic syntax of Python, C++ and Java via Sololearn and CodeAcademy a month ago and have been using HackerRank as a way to test my own skills. I would just like to ask is there any other websites similar to HackerRank that yall will recommend, or websites in general to learn programming (I have been looking for places to learn C but seems rather limited based on what I have found - best been CS50 on youtube)

Many thanks!

January 7, 2018 -

A lot of people on this sub practice on Leetcode. It is no doubt the best place to practice inter.view questions. However, unless you are a premium user, there isn't a good methodological way to learn algorithms. You can check out https://www.lintcode.com/ladder/2/

They have a special question ladder called "US Giants". It contains just the right amount of easy, medium and hard questions for each topic (most of them from Leetcode). There are 122 questions in total and I did around 80% of them. Almost every new question that I see in my interviews is a variation of what I already did on Lintcode.

P.S - It's free!. Thanks to our Asian friends :)

August 8, 2023 -

Sup everyone!

I'm working on a free alternative to courses such as Grokking the Coding Interview. This alternative is different for two reasons:

1. All the content is free and will never be behind a paywall

2. It has fun animations!

You can find the course here. Right now it includes breakdowns of 4 common algorithm patterns, as well as 40 animated solutions to common questions (along with detailed explanations!) found on Neetcode 150 and Blind 75.

Here are some examples of those animated solutions:

Depth First Search

https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/code/depth-first-search/flood-fill

Flood Fill

https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/code/depth-first-search/number-of-islands

Number of Islands

Dynamic Programming

https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/code/dynamic-programming/counting-bits

Counting Bits

https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/code/dynamic-programming/word-break

Word Break

Matrices

https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/code/matrices/rotate-image

Rotate Image

The course is split into four groups, and if anything is marked as "Coming Soon" it'll be released in the near future, so stayed tuned!

1. Introduction to Algorithm Patterns, which gets you familiar with using algorithm patterns to solve related classes of problems

2. Data Structures: which teaches you to recgonize the types of problems that are fit for different data structures

3. Traversal Algorithms: which covers BFS and DFS in a variety of contexts and use cases

4. Dynamic Programming: which covers the basics of dynamic programming and teaches you they are needed for optimization problems

Let me know if you have questions, comments, or feedback and I hope this helps!

- Jimmy

January 1, 2023 -

I'm looking for a platform similar to leetcode, codecademy where I can learn lessons and practice exercises while keeping track of my progress. Are there such sites for docker?

I want to get at least beginner level better before I setup VPS and practice on actual server.