Brought to You By:

• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.

• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers

• Google Cloud Run – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra.

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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.

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Timestamps

00:00 Intro

02:57 Neet’s take on coding interviews

06:41 Getting into tech

08:56 Why Neet isn't a fan of the CAP theorem

13:12 Quitting Amazon after two months

18:22 Google vs Amazon

22:26 The origins of NeetCode

25:27 Leaving Google to go all in on NeetCode

32:02 Why Neet doesn't fix every bug

39:26 The value of coding interview prep

42:57 Systems thinking and domain expertise

47:28 Hiring at Big Tech

52:15 Tech stack at Neetcode

57:57 The NeetCode  redesign contest

1:01:46 The future of software engineers

1:09:04 Hot takes: AGI, AI skill erosion, personality traits

1:22:49 “Maybe some people should just give up”

1:24:39 How to be a standout engineer

1:27:55 Book recommendation

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• Learnings from conducting ~1,000 interviews at Amazon

• How experienced engineers get unstuck in coding interviews

• The Reality of Tech Interviews in 2025

• Tech hiring: is this an inflection point?

• AI fakers exposed in tech dev recruitment: postmortem

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Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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