Is AlgoExpert Worth It? FAANG Engineer’s Review

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In this video I review AlgoExpert and SystemExpert from the perspective of a current FANNG engineer. As someone who has landed jobs at these top tech companies that AlgoExpert and SystemsExpert helps people get jobs at, do I think it’s a good prep platform? Or is it just a bunch of YouTube/social media hype?

For some background, my typical interview prep consisted of going through Cracking the Coding Interview and then doing a lot of LeetCode. It landed me an internship at Microsoft, and full-time job offers at Google, Qualtrics, Microsoft, and a handful of other companies.

I’ll be separating this review into 3 sections: what I like, what I don’t like, and whether I would purchase it again for job recruiting purposes.

First off is what I like. I like how I don’t have to think to myself, “is this a good question or not?” Like I typically have to do with LeetCode. With LeetCode I have to comb through so many questions and ask myself whether it’s a good question or not. A lot of questions are just bad questions — they don’t provide enough context, the question is worded weirdly, or it tests you on some very niche algorithm for the solution. I don’t have to worry about that with AlgoExpert because I’m they all seem to be pretty good questions that are prescreened.

I also enjoy some of the smaller features that AlgoExpert.io includes, specifically the stopwatch feature and the ability to store multiple solutions. The stopwatch feature in particular is really nice because it helps you keep track of how long you’re spending on a particular problem. I think it’s really useful to put a time limit on the amount of time that you have to solve a problem since in a real interview you will only get 30-40 minutes to solve a problem. The multiple solutions feature is also really nice because often times when you’re solving a tree or graph problem I like to implement it recursively and iteratively so whereas previously I would have to comment out or erase my previous solution, I can just separate it into multiple tabs.

Last but not least is the videos. The video explanations are very in depth and will definitely provide you with a solid understanding of how to solve the problems. BUT you need to have some basic knowledge of coding beforehand (which you can get by going through their data structures crash course on their website).

What I Don’t Like:
I feel like the UI could be polished a little more. One very, very small example of this is that I actually found it a bit hard to find the questions when I logged in. I didn’t really like how even after I had a paid account the tabs of “What’s AlgoExpert?” And “What’s SystemsExpert?” Were still live. They just seemed to be a bit unnecessary since I purchased the product and already know what these two products are. I feel like a better flow would be to automatically redirect users to the last content page that they were on so they go straight to the questions/videos/etc. It very much feels like a platform designed by engineers (not a bad thing since I am an engineer myself), but I just feel like there’s a certain element of polish that’s missing to look at the platform and be like, “Wow. This is beautifully designed.”

Another thing I don’t like is...the videos. I know I mentioned that I like the videos with their in-depth explanations, but I think that for some solutions I don’t really need the in-depth solutions and could do with a very high-level explanation of what’s going on. I don’t want to have to watch through a 30-40min video every single time to understand the problem. Yes, I know that they have their code solutions tab, but I wish there was a middle ground between just the code and the 30-40min long video explanation of a short written explanation as well.

Would I Recommend It?
Short answer is yes. It has good content and good explanations.
Long answer is that it also depends. While 125 questions is a great number of questions, I don’t think that it is a complete replacement to LeetCode (I believe that Clement Mihailescu, the CEO of AlgoExpert, has also said that he doesn’t intend for it to be a replacement to LeetCode either). It’s more of a Cracking the Coding Interview replacement as it has great learning material through its data structure crash course as well as the very, very in-depth reviews of the problems. If you’re a beginner and going through your first interview prep cycle, then I think AlgoExpert is great in that it really provides you with great fundamentals and foundational knowledge to solve these problems. I feel like after you get through the 125 questions, however, it’s still useful to have something like LeetCode where you can just go through tons and tons of practice questions to get more reps in.