After months of disappointment, finally received offers from Google and Atlassian🙏 Sharing my experiences

I come from a not-so-well-known company and recently got laid off. I applied to a number of companies and received interviews from only a few of them. I was getting really worried and feeling the stre

I come from a not-so-well-known company and recently got laid off. I applied to a number of companies and received interviews from only a few of them. I was getting really worried and feeling the stress from the family too. Through a combination of consistent preparation and some luck, I was fortunate enough to receive offers in the end from my dream companies. LeetCode and Reddit interview experience posts helped a lot, so I wanted to share a few lessons that were particularly helpful for me. # Onsite Interviews: What Actually Matters In onsite interviews, performance largely comes down to three things: * Communication * Problem-solving approach * Correct and clean implementation # Communication Clear communication with the interviewer is critical. The goal is to walk them through your reasoning step by step, validating assumptions and adjusting based on feedback. Many excellent resources already cover this, so I won’t repeat them here. # Using Recent high frequency questions list effectively Posts and websites that share real and recent high-frequency question lists were one of the most valuable resources in my preparation. One key lesson: >You don’t truly understand a solution until you can write correct code under interview conditions. Several times, I felt confident after reading a solution, only to realize during implementation that my understanding was incomplete or incorrect. Always write the code. Even a partial implementation is far better than passive reading. # How to Review Recent high frequency questions * If you are time-constrained, find websites that share the list and practice as many questions as you can. * If you have more time, go through the questions you had a hard time figuring out the solution the first time, and do it without looking at the solution again. # My experience: For Google, I got brand new, never-seen questions, but I was able to solve them. Practicing recent high-frequency tags helped a lot. For Atlassian, I was lucky and got the exact questions that I practiced before. It was also shared here on leetcode: <a href="https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7537985/atlassian-senior-eng-coding-by-anonymous-w7ab/.