Is LeetCode the best way to prepare for interviews?
The coding interview process is notoriously difficult, and the preparation process isn’t any easier. Developers often spend months preparing for their coding interviews. At most big tech companies, coding problems are the biggest part of the interview process.
LeetCode is a popular tool that developers use to prepare for their technical interviews. Today, we’re going to take a deeper look at LeetCode along with its advantages and disadvantages. We’ll also discuss alternative ways to practice Leetcode Problems for your coding interview.
Answer any interview problem by learning the patterns behind common questions.#
Structure your LeetCode prep: Build a roadmap, not a to-do list#
Routinely jumping between random problems can burn you out or lead to shallow familiarity. Instead, build a layered roadmap with phases:
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Foundation phase — cover all core data structures and algorithms (arrays, strings, hash maps, recursion, sorting) with easy problems.
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Pattern mastery phase — pick 3 to 5 common problem types (e.g. sliding window, two pointers, tree DFS) and solve multiple variants of each to internalize strategies.
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Mixed difficulty & timed drills — combine easy, medium, and hard problems under a time cap (45 minutes), simulating actual interview pace.
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Review & revisit phase — come back to the hardest problems you struggled with, re-solve them from scratch after weeks, reinforce weak spots.
As you proceed, track your progress: number of problems solved, patterns mastered, success rate on timed sets, time taken per problem, topics you consistently struggle with.
This roadmap approach helps you avoid rote memorization and builds transferable problem-solving skills.
What is LeetCode?#
LeetCode is a website where people can practice solving coding problems and prepare for technical interviews. Their main users are software engineers. LeetCode has over 1,900 questions for you to practice, covering many different programming concepts. Every coding problem has a classification of either Easy, Medium, or Hard.
The problems focus on algorithms and data structures. Here are some example problems you can find on LeetCode:
- Anagrams
- Binary Search Tree (BST)
- Level order traversal
- Linked lists
- Longest substring without repeating characters
- Palindromes
- Path sum
- Two sum
- Sorted arrays
- Sorted lists
- Subsequences
- Valid parentheses
- 2D matrix
- Bash
- C
- C#
- C++
- Go
- Java
- JavaScript
- Kotlin
- MySQL
- MS SQL
- Oracle
- PHP
- Python
- Python3
- Racket
- Ruby
- Rust
- Scala
- Swift
- TypeScript
Helpful and active community#
LeetCode has a large and active community. This community provides users with a great platform to engage with other developers, gain insight into how other developers are solving problems, and learn from other developers’ mistakes.
Disadvantages of LeetCode#
It’s just about the code#
You need to be an impressive programmer to get hired by a top tech company, but being a good coder isn’t the only thing that matters. While LeetCode is a solid resource for coding problem practice, they have no content that covers soft skills.
Soft skills are becoming increasingly important in the tech industry. Companies are looking for great leaders and communicators. They want their candidates to have strong teamwork skills and to thrive in ambiguous situations. These are qualities that simply cannot be learned with LeetCode.
Remember that you’re being evaluated not just on your coding abilities, but also on fit. Here are some important qualities to demonstrate in a technical interview:
- Empathy
- Listening skills
- Teamwork
- Effective communication
- Eagerness to learn
- Etc.
Applicants who don’t receive a job offer aren’t necessarily bad candidates. Many of them got great grades, attended a top university, and spent months and months preparing for their interviews, but it’s about more than that.
It’s not free#
While LeetCode has a solid amount of free coding problems, you need to pay for a Premium subscription to access their entire collection of questions.
Recognizing patterns — the key to smarter prep#
The real power of LeetCode comes when you stop treating each problem as unique and start seeing patterns. Some common patterns include:
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Two Pointers / Sliding Window
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Recursion and Backtracking
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Dynamic Programming / Memoization
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Tree Traversals & Graph DFS/BFS
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Greedy Algorithms
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Binary Search on answer space
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Heap / Priority Queue tricks
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Union-Find / Disjoint Set
Rather than memorizing each problem, map it to a pattern. Once you see the pattern, you can adapt your solution even when test cases are varied. Many experts call this the divide between those who “do LeetCode” and those who “use LeetCode.”
Memorization vs. lasting learning#
LeetCode helps you pass your technical interviews, but its usefulness doesn’t extend much beyond that. The solutions you memorize for LeetCode don’t transfer to real-world software engineering problems. In fact, many tech companies are moving away from LeetCode-style interview questions and moving toward job-focused questions.
Many candidates use services like LeetCode to prepare for interviews and memorize countless solutions to problems. Since most candidates know the answers to these questions, companies are beginning to incorporate more creative coding problems into their interview process.
Developers have been seeing more companies use methods like paired programming to assess a candidate’s skills. Paired programming is a great opportunity to showcase your communication, leadership, and teamwork skills. It’s important to gain relevant experience prior to applying for positions. This can be done in various ways, such as internships and projects.
Let’s take a look at some alternative ways to prepare for coding interviews that will help you develop long-lasting skills for your career.
Alternative ways to prepare#
While LeetCode is a popular tool for interview prep, there are other ways to prepare for difficult coding interview problems. Your resume is the perfect place to highlight your talent and experience. Let’s look at some alternative prep options.
Projects#
Keep in mind that you’re not the only person applying for a position. It’s important to have a strong resume that highlights relevant and interesting experiences and accomplishments. Personal projects will allow you to showcase your creativity and problem-solving skills.
Your projects should use skills that you’ll regularly use on the job. While you don’t need to perfectly match the job requirements, make sure the skills are relevant. Additionally, it’s a good idea to work on realistic, practical problems in your projects. Your interviewer wants to see that you can solve real-world problems.
Tip: Contributions to open source are great too! Open source is viewed very highly. Doing this kind of work allows you to contribute to something much larger than yourself.
Internships#
Internships are a great way to gain relevant experience and skills. Internships give you a taste of real-world programming. A solid internship prepares you for your full-time career and gives you a lot of experience to highlight when interviewing. Make sure to highlight relevant experience and skills, quantifiable achievements, and your unique qualities when adding internship information to your resume.
Mock interviews#
Mock interviews are a great way to practice demonstrating your soft skills. See if you can partner up with a friend or classmate and perform mock interviews together. You can practice talking through problems, asking and answering questions, and showcasing your communication, collaboration, and leadership skills.
Simulate real interviews and stress test your approach#
Working alone on problems is helpful, but the actual interview environment is different. To mirror that:
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Time yourself — limit 30–45 minutes per problem, stop when time is up.
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Verbalize your logic — speak your plan before you code, ask clarifying questions (as you would in a real interview).
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Code with minimal aids — avoid autocomplete or heavy IDE support; write manually to simulate the whiteboard or limited editor environment.
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Use platforms with mock modes — some platforms emulate interview constraints or lock in time pressures.
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Review mistakes under pressure — after each mock, go back through every bug, inefficiency, or edge-case you missed, and reimplement cleanly.
These tactics improve your composure, pacing, and flexibility under pressure.
Answer any interview problem by learning the patterns behind common questions.
Don’t overfit — avoid memorization traps & promote flexible thinking#
A common mistake is overfitting LeetCode — learning a handful of problems and their solutions too well, then being unable to generalize to new variants. To avoid this:
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Solve unseen problems regularly, not just those on bookmarks or curated lists.
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Focus on transforming and combining patterns, not just repeated variants.
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Resist the urge to memorize code — instead, internalize the approach, rationale, and trade-offs.
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Carry out review cycles every couple of weeks to revisit prior problems without looking at your old solution first.
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With each solved problem, ask: What if input size doubled? What if values negative? What if constraints changed?
At scale, interview success comes from adaptability, not rote recall.
Wrapping up#
Leetcoding is a popular way to practice various coding problems. Many questions that appear in coding interviews are available to practice on LeetCode. Although LeetCode has its advantages, there’s more to the coding interview than just memorized LeetCode solutions. It’s important to engage in lasting learning to prepare yourself for not just your technical interview, but for your career.
Educative offers online courses for fields like machine learning, data science, app development, interview prep, and much more. Begin preparing for your coding interview today with Educative’s Grokking Coding Interview Patterns series.
Our interview prep course has helped developers prepare for interviews with top tech companies like Netflix, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
By the end, you’ll be ready to interview with confidence and you’ll have lasting skills to help you in your journey.
Happy learning!
