How a Non-Computer Science Student Nailed a Meta Software dev job
Hint: Did not bribe the hiring team. The structured, strategic way to succeed at LeetCode interviews
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In my last year of high school and early years of college, I became one of the top-ranked competitive programmers in the world. I solved Google’s notoriously difficult Foobar Challenge, placed well in competitions, and spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about algorithm optimization. Competitive programming is essentially LeetCode problems on crack; harder variants of the problems that push the boundaries of what’s tractable under time pressure.
That background led to tutoring. People heard I was good at this stuff and started asking for help preparing for technical interviews. That’s how I met H.
H was a non-Computer Science front-end dev with a Meta (then Facebook) interview lined up. Working with them brought some real constraints—
Full-time work meant we could only meet twice a week, max.
No CS fundamentals to build on (they had only started coding on the job, building websites).
~3 months to get interview-ready.
Not ideal conditions, but workable if we were systematic about it.
This article is the exact story of how we worked together to get H that job.
I’m sharing it a practical demonstration of the learning frameworks I’ve discussed at length in other AI Made Simple posts. The purpose here is to show you how well that framework can generalize and enable your learning journey, even in adjacent fields.
In the article below, we cover:
The metrics we use to maximize our preparation for Leetcode Prep.
The stages of preparation and why we structured things the way we did.
What we didn’t do (and where most people stumble).
+ Bonus difficult Leetcode Question to show you how to structure/approach problems IRL. PS: I no longer do Leetcode coaching, so I made all my solutions/study materials free here.
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(+ many others that succeeded with this framework)
