Tech interviews with NeetCode

Navdeep Singh, known as NeetCode, discussed his journey from Amazon and Google to building NeetCode.io, a coding interview preparation platform, on The Pragmatic Engineer podcast. He argued that LeetCode-style interviews survive because they scale, not because they predict job performance, and emphasized that learning hard problems builds judgment that remains valuable despite AI advancements.

Stream the latest episode Listen and watch now on YouTube and Apple you can try Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2Bho9xCbOQMWMJ7UKmqCzD , but there’s an ongoing outage, again, new episodes are not published . See the episode transcript at the top of this page, and timestamps for the episode at the bottom. Brought to You by • Antithesis – If you’re using agents to code, the problem isn’t writing the code but making sure it didn’t break anything. Antithesis runs your whole system in a hostile environment and identifies hard-to-find bugs before users hit them in production. With Antithesis, teams like Jane Street, Fly.io, and the etcd community use agents safely and ship better code, faster. Learn more. https://antithesis.com/pragmatic • Sentry – application monitoring software built by developers, for developers. 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In this episode Navdeep Singh – oftentimes better known as NeetCode – is the creator of NeetCode.io, one of the most popular coding interview preparation platforms and YouTube channels for software engineers. Before building NeetCode full-time, he worked as a software engineer at Amazon and Google. In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Neet to discuss his path from Amazon and Google to building his own startup, why he left Amazon after just two months, what he learned at Google, and the decision to leave a stable engineering career to bet on himself. We also discuss what coding interview preparation teaches beyond passing interviews, the value of going deep on difficult problems, and why systems thinking and domain expertise remain essential engineering skills in the age of AI. Throughout the conversation, NeetCode makes the case that learning hard things is one of the single best investments an engineer can make, helping build the judgment and expertise that remain valuable no matter how the tools change. Key observations from Neet Here are 10 interesting takeaways from our chat: 1. Companies have no real method for evaluating engineers, and likely never did . Neet believes that the leetcode-style interview survived not because it predicts job performance but because it scales suprisingly well at large tech companies that need to train hundreds or thousands of interviewers. 2. The CAP theorem’s “two of three” framing is widely taught but technically shaky. Neet felt that is an awkward theorem that is incomplete, and felt validated when Martin Kleppmann publicly criticized it too https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/09/17/critique-of-the-cap-theorem.html . This is a good reminder that it’s worth thinking for yourself, and not accepting theorems as true, without understanding them. 3. Amazon’s intense culture left Neet in afraid to ask for help – and that paradoxically, this helped him at Google. At Neet’s first job, he became used to work alone and to never ask questions, and continued this working style at Google. At Gooogle, his Google manager read him as independent: and thanks to this independence, he got promoted very quickly from L3 to L4 to the mid-level engineering role. 4. The Neetcode YouTube channel took off after Neet posted that he’ll post less because he got into Google. Before he shared that he got a software engieneering job at Google – back at that time, one of the most competitive companies to get into – there were not many people watching the Neetcode channel https://www.youtube.com/c/neetcode . Sharing that he got into Google turned out to be the best “sales pitch” though: and suddenly, people wanted to understand what he’d practiced that helped him get this job 5. Cheating tools are resulting in in-person whiteboard interviews returning at Google. Neet noted how Google has started to return to onside onsite coding interviews, because it is only in this setting that interviewiewers can make sure that interviewees are not using invisible AI-powered cheating tools, which make it effortless to do well on data structure and algorithms DSA interviews. 6. Neet finds AI most valuable as a tech-debt and refactoring assistant. Neet is using AI to clean up years of very bad code quality on the Neetcode backend. Doint so also validates his original decision to take shortcuts because they could later be corrected. 7. Effort is becoming the differentiator because AI made everything else cheap. Neet says how you can prompt a design, a feature, or an answer to a coding question. But you cannot prompt caring, or your ability to defend why you made a choice. You can only do these if you put in the effort, and don’t leave it all to AI 8. Predictions of coding’s death haven’t materialized as expected. Despite dramatic AI model improvements, Neet does not observe most engineers aren’t being laid off. In fact, he sees the opposite: devs doing more work than before 9. Weighing tradeoffs is likely to be someting that we’ll remain better than LLMs. While LLMs have become a lot better at coding, Neet doesn’t believe they will be all that helpful making decisions involving judgement tradeoffs. 10. When hiring for Neetcode, personality traits and motivation are more important than coding skill. Neet’s best, recent hire is still an undergrad. This hire does not have as much coding experience, but does exceptionally well thanks to high agency. As Neet explained: “even if they have no idea how to start it, a week later they’ll have learned everything about it.” The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode • Learnings from conducting ~1,000 interviews at Amazon https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/learnings-from-conducting-1000-interviews • How experienced engineers get unstuck in coding interviews https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-to-get-unstuck-during-coding-interviews • The Reality of Tech Interviews in 2025 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-reality-of-tech-interviews • Tech hiring: is this an inflection point? https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tech-hiring-inflection-point • AI fakers exposed in tech dev recruitment: postmortem https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-fakers Timestamps 00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos Intro 02:57 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=177s Neet’s take on coding interviews 06:41 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=401s Getting into tech 08:56 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=536s Why Neet isn’t a fan of the CAP theorem 13:12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=792s Quitting Amazon after two months 18:22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=1102s Google vs Amazon 22:26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=1346s The origins of NeetCode 25:27 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=1527s Leaving Google to go all in on NeetCode 32:02 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=1922s Why Neet doesn’t fix every bug 39:26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=2366s The value of coding interview prep 42:57 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=2577s Systems thinking and domain expertise 47:28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=2848s Hiring at Big Tech 52:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=3135s Tech stack at Neetcode 57:57 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=3477s The NeetCode redesign contest 1:01:46 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=3706s The future of software engineers 1:09:04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=4144s Hot takes: AGI, AI skill erosion, personality traits 1:22:49 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=4969s “Maybe some people should just give up” 1:24:39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=5079s How to be a standout engineer 1:27:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xafwfGVBxos&t=5275s Book recommendation References Where to find Navdeep Singh NeetCode : • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navdeep-singh-3aaa14161 https://www.linkedin.com/in/navdeep-singh-3aaa14161 • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/neetcode https://www.youtube.com/c/neetcode • Website: https://neetcode.io https://neetcode.io Mentions during the episode: • A critique of the CAP theorem: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/09/17/critique-of-the-cap-theorem.html https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/09/17/critique-of-the-cap-theorem.html • Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/designing-data-intensive-applications https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/designing-data-intensive-applications • PACELC design principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACELC design principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACELC design principle • Amazon Chime: https://aws.amazon.com/chime/getting-started https://aws.amazon.com/chime/getting-started • Musk’s 5 Step Design Process: https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/musks-5-step-design-process https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/musks-5-step-design-process • AI Engineering with Chip Huyen: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-engineering-with-chip-huyen https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-engineering-with-chip-huyen • Angular: https://angular.dev https://angular.dev • Firebase: https://firebase.google.com https://firebase.google.com • TypeScript: https://www.typescriptlang.org https://www.typescriptlang.org • An update on recent Claude Code quality reports: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem • Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-claude-code-with-boris-cherny https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-claude-code-with-boris-cherny • Sora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora text-to-video model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora text-to-video model • Attention is all you need: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 • The End of Programming as We Know It: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-programming-as-we-know-it https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-programming-as-we-know-it • Satya Nadella on X: https://x.com/satyanadella https://x.com/satyanadella • Replit: https://replit.com https://replit.com • Lovable: https://lovable.dev https://lovable.dev • 37signals: https://37signals.com https://37signals.com • DHH’s new way of writing code: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/dhhs-new-way-of-writing-code https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/dhhs-new-way-of-writing-code • MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com https://www.mongodb.com • Maybe some people should just give up: — Production and marketing by Pen Name https://penname.co/ .