100 LeetCode Problems Later, and I Still Feel Nowhere Near Interview Ready
I’ve been working as a software engineer for quite some time and got lucky enough to land a job without any DSA knowledge whatsoever, just by practicing real-world projects in my spare time. Now I want to transition to another job, and I decided to learn DSA to close my knowledge gaps and avoid missing out on positions where LeetCode-style interviews are required.
I started from almost zero knowledge of DSA and have already solved 100 questions from the NeetCode 250 roadmap: hash maps, sliding window, two pointers, linked lists, and binary search. I haven’t touched more advanced topics yet, like backtracking, graphs, or dynamic programming.
It took me about 1.5 months of daily practice for a couple of hours a day, plus almost full-time study on weekends. And I still can’t say I’m able to solve any medium questions within 20–30 minutes, even for the topics I’ve already learned.
I can definitely say I’ve improved, since previously, even easy problems felt insanely difficult to me. I can solve some medium ones on my own now, but I clearly see that I need way more practice even for these basic algorithms. Right now it feels like it’ll take me a year or more.
Seeing big tech companies ask hard graph problems or similar questions feels so wild and unreachable to me.
So my question to you guys is: what was your journey learning LeetCode like? Some people say it took them only 2–3 months of studying LeetCode before they landed a big tech job. I can clearly see that’s probably not going to be the case for me.
Am I dumb? How long did it take you to learn this stuff from ground zero before you stopped being afraid of LeetCode-style interviews? A week? A month? A year? More?