NeetCode Won't Save You in a Staff Eng Interview
Gergely Orosz and NeetCode made a course together. It's good. It's also not enough if you're interviewing above senior. Here's what the gap actually is and why people keep failing loop after loop.
I watched a senior engineer at my last job grind LeetCode for four months. 300 problems. NeetCode 150 done twice. He failed five consecutive staff-level loops at Stripe, Databricks, and Coinbase. Not because he couldn't reverse a linked list. Because nobody taught him what staff interviews actually test.
Gergely Orosz and NeetCode built a course together. It's probably the most honest product in this space. Gergely doesn't sugarcoat. NeetCode's explanations are clean. I'm not here to trash it.
But here's the thing. It's solving the right problem for the wrong level.
What it gets right
The behavioral section is genuinely good. Gergely knows how big tech hiring actually works and it shows. The system design coverage is solid for senior-level. If you're targeting L5 at Google or E5 at Meta, this is probably the most efficient path to not embarrassing yourself on a design round.
Where it stops working
Staff interviews don't test whether you can design a URL shortener. They test whether you can identify the wrong problem, push back on requirements, and make a call when three senior engineers in the room disagree. That's not a LeetCode skill. That's not even a system design skill. That's judgment under pressure and you can't pattern-match your way to it.
In 2023 we had a staff eng loop at a 2,000-person company where three candidates failed the same round. The feedback each time was identical: technically strong, couldn't drive ambiguity. None of them had practiced that. None of the prep courses teach it.
Don't do this. Don't spend four months on NeetCode and walk into a staff loop thinking you're ready. Use the course. Then go find someone who's actually done staff work and do mock ambiguity drills until it's uncomfortable.