How I Reached the Third Round of a Google SWE Internship Interview Without LeetCode

I got three rounds into a Google SWE internship process without ever having seriously practiced LeetCode. The first round was a screening call, the second was behavioral, and the process was for an internship tied to Google's Dublin office.

The third round was a palindrome, and I wasn't ready

Round three was a live coding challenge, a palindrome problem. At the time I didn't have much LeetCode experience, and my coding skills under that kind of pressure weren't where they needed to be. I got through it, but not the way I wanted to, and I came out of that call convinced I'd blown it.

I thought I'd lost the opportunity of my life

That's genuinely how it felt right after the call, like I'd wasted the one shot I was ever going to get. More opportunities came after that one, and looking back, it wasn't the defining moment it felt like at the time.

What I did after

I started actually practicing data structures and LeetCode after that interview instead of before it, which says something on its own. I think I've gotten better at it since. I can work through problems now that I would have frozen on back then.

Still not really my thing

Even with the practice, LeetCode isn't what pulls me in. I'd rather be working through a system design problem, figuring out how the pieces of a real architecture fit together, than grinding another array manipulation question. Getting three rounds into a Google process without much of a LeetCode background proved I could get pretty far on fundamentals and communication alone. It also showed me exactly where the gap was.