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Do I actually need to grind LeetCode if I'm not chasing FAANG?

Anonymous19 Jul 2026

I want a solid product company, not necessarily a trillion-dollar one. Everyone around me is grinding 300+ LeetCode problems and I'm wondering how much of that is real signal for the roles I actually want, vs just cargo-culted from FAANG interview loops.

For people at non-FAANG product companies — how algorithm-heavy was your loop, really? I've got limited evening hours and I want to spend them on the thing that actually moves the needle.

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Anonymous19 Jul 2026
To split the difference in this thread: it's less about company tier and more about the specific team's interview style — which you can usually just ask the recruiter about. "What does the technical loop look like?" is a totally normal question and it tells you exactly how much to grind. I've had two offers from similar-sized companies with wildly different loops.
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Anonymous19 Jul 2026
Depends who you apply to though — plenty of non-FAANG companies still copy the FAANG loop because it's the default template, so you can't fully skip it. I'd do enough that the core patterns (two pointers, hashmap, BFS/DFS) feel automatic, then stop. Diminishing returns hit really hard after that point.
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Anonymous19 Jul 2026
Non-FAANG product company here. My loop was one "reverse a linked list"-tier warmup and then mostly practical stuff — debug this, extend this feature, talk through a rough design. Grinding 300 hards would've been a total waste for us. Something like 50 easy/medium so I didn't freeze on basics was plenty.
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