Interviewing is hard. You could be an awesome web developer who could roll out an app over the weekend and still fail at a job interview for a web developer position.

Sounds little crazy, isn't it?

That is because the whole interviewing is skewed towards new grads who has taken data structures and algorithms course and has a fresh memory of the problems. White boarding is the common interviewing technique where you will be given an algorithmic problem solving question and expect you to solve an optimized O solution in 45 mins to 1 hour.

If you are a developer with a full time job and are planning to switch to a new company, you are out of luck. Unless you have 3-4 months to prepare for interviews, you would have tough time clearing interviews with the top tech companies or start-up's. And if you decide to spend time preparing for the algorithms and data structure problems, you will need a good resource which lets you focus on problem solving rather than overwhelming you with a lot of content.

Leetcode, Lintcode, Hackerrank, Hackerearth and Interviewbit are some of the leading preparation platforms. Of all these, Leetcode is the most famous one because of its vast collection of questions and a company focussed preparation style. Like if you are  interviewing with Amazon, there's a company category with Amazon's name and under it are all the questions that were asked in the interviews for candidates over the years. These questions are crowd sourced and so they build up to the extent of having almost all questions asked by Amazon.

Leetcode Premium

Leetcode monetizes its platform by charging users around $35 a month or $159 per year. The monthly charge is little significant and the yearly fee seems like a stretch. Users always have this dilemma that they would only need the membership for 2 months and plan to wrap up their preparation in that time. While it is true that you would only need it for 2 months in an ideal scenario, real life job hunting is far from ideal. Your job search will usually stretch for 3-4 months and you end up paying $140 for 4 months. At this point, a yearly membership seems more reasonable and value for your money.

The premium allows you to unlock 2 very important features. First is to filter the questions by company category and the second is access to their premium questions which are frequently asked in many interviews.

Lintcode VIP

Lintcode is a very similar platform to Leetcode, some say it is a clone. But I think it is a very good alternative. Their UI/UX is pretty great and they too have categories with company names. It actually used to be a free platform until the last few months. I guess they realized that their platform is strong enough to force people to pay, they made some of the features available only under their lintcode vip.

Leetcode vs Lintcode

While hackerrank, interviewbit are really good platforms. Leetcode and Lintcode have become more popular partly to their offering of allowing users to see all questions asked by a certain company.

Of these two, Leetcode wins partly because they have a better collection, a very active community and the price is not so different from what lintcode charges.