CrackingWalnuts
Coding is the headline round. Behavioral mines what you already have from school, internships, and side work. The good news: the bar is lower than you fear, and most of your competition over-prepares the wrong things.
Write correct code, know the fundamentals cold, and pass the coding and basics screen.
Salary is approximate market context, not a promise. It varies a lot by country, company, and year.
Can you actually do this?
If one makes you hesitate, that is the gap. Open it to go learn it.
Usually 2-3 rounds. LeetCode easy to medium. Clean code, talk through your reasoning, handle edge cases.
1 round, sometimes folded into the hiring manager. Most stories come from school projects, internships, and side work.
Light LLD at some companies (Amazon, Microsoft). Parking Lot or simple OOP problems. Not deep design.
Rare at new grad. Some companies (Meta E3 sometimes) ask a very simple design question. Usually skipped.
1 round. Mostly culture fit, motivation, why this team. Have 2-3 questions ready.
Startups and some smaller companies. 2-4 hours, small full-stack feature. Submit clean code with tests.
| Round | Tested? | Weight | What to expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coding (DSA) | yes | high | Usually 2-3 rounds. LeetCode easy to medium. Clean code, talk through your reasoning, handle edge cases. |
| Behavioral | yes | medium | 1 round, sometimes folded into the hiring manager. Most stories come from school projects, internships, and side work. |
| Low-Level Design (LLD) | sometimes | medium | Light LLD at some companies (Amazon, Microsoft). Parking Lot or simple OOP problems. Not deep design. |
| Light System Design | sometimes | low | Rare at new grad. Some companies (Meta E3 sometimes) ask a very simple design question. Usually skipped. |
| Hiring Manager | yes | medium | 1 round. Mostly culture fit, motivation, why this team. Have 2-3 questions ready. |
| Take-home | sometimes | varies | Startups and some smaller companies. 2-4 hours, small full-stack feature. Submit clean code with tests. |
The most common new-grad mistake is studying Senior or Staff content. Use this list to cut early.
Arrays, strings, trees, graphs, two pointers, sliding window, dynamic programming basics.
Internship stories, capstone projects, hackathons. Mine what you already have.
Quick reference for time complexity, sorting, common patterns. Final-week review.
Class boundaries, OOP fundamentals. Parking Lot, Vending Machine, Library.
TCP vs UDP, HTTP, what happens when you type a URL. Some companies ask this.
Most new grads fail because of murky explanations, not because of wrong answers. Practice talking through your code.
Senior-level material. Even basics rarely come up at new grad. Don't burn weeks on this.
Paxos, Raft, vector clocks are not on the bar at new grad.
Kubernetes internals, observability stacks, security frameworks. Skip.
Architecture decisions, platform engineering, org design. Not your level.
You don't have them yet. School projects and internships are enough.
Unless you're targeting an AI lab specifically. General loops don't test this at new grad.
Coding is by far the highest-leverage area at new grad. Spend most of your time at the top of the list.
Coding is the highest-weight round at new grad. Pattern recognition decides offers.
Most new grads fumble this. A clean 90-second 'tell me about yourself' alone puts you ahead.
Required at Amazon, Microsoft. Skip if your target company doesn't have an LLD round.
Quick reference for time complexity, sorting, and common patterns. Use the day of.
Some companies ask basic networking. Cover TCP, HTTP, DNS at a working level.
Assumes 15-20 hours per week (you have more time as a student than working engineers do). Adjust down if you're juggling classes.
Each company has its own quirks for new grad loops. Click through for the full breakdown.
4-5 rounds, one of them a Bar Raiser. Heavy on Leadership Principles even at new grad. LLD usually asked. Coding is LeetCode easy to medium.
4-5 rounds. Algorithm-heavy coding, sometimes a light data structures round. Googleyness behavioral. No system design.
4 rounds: 2 coding, 1 behavioral (Jedi), 1 hiring manager. Coding is 2 medium problems in 45 minutes each. Tight time pressure.
3-4 rounds: coding, LLD, behavioral woven through. Microsoft's growth-mindset culture (its Model-Coach-Care leadership model) sets the tone. LeetCode easy to medium.
Team-specific. 3-4 rounds, often with a take-home or domain-specific question. Behavioral focuses on craft and curiosity.
Practical coding (90-min build), bug squash, behavioral, hiring manager. Less algorithms, more 'can you write working code'.
Targeting a company not listed? The bar is the same across big tech. Pick the closest example above, or browse all companies.