I just released the extended cut of my conversation with Neetcode (Navdeep Singh), and honestly, this might be the most raw discussion about Big Tech culture I've published. While the 45-minute version hits the highlights, the extended cut goes places we couldn't fit in the main episode – like when Navi breaks down exactly why Google's infrastructure teams have the most interesting work but it's all legacy code, or his fascinating take on why AI can't solve the "Copy List with Random Pointer" verification problem (which, hilariously, is what Amazon asks principal engineers). We also dive deep into what he calls "missing life's 101 lecture" – how so many of us in tech never learned the basic social algorithms that everyone else seems to know intuitively.
What really stuck with me was his advice for people who've sent out 1000 applications with no callbacks: "There are no rules anymore. Feel free to throw the rulebook out the window." Coming from someone who survived Amazon's meat grinde…
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