{"id":314,"date":"2026-01-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/springgreen-curlew-885344.hostingersite.com\/blog\/neetcode-150-vs-blind-75\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T10:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T10:38:12","slug":"neetcode-150-vs-blind-75","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastroundai.com\/blog\/neetcode-150-vs-blind-75","title":{"rendered":"NeetCode 150 vs Blind 75: I Did Both. Here’s What I Learned."},"content":{"rendered":"

In May 2022, Yangshun Tay, the Meta staff engineer who originally posted the Blind 75 list on Teamblind back in 2018, quietly updated his Tech Interview Handbook<\/a> to stop recommending the list he made famous. He replaced it with Grind 75, a newer version he described as more carefully ordered and customizable. Four years later, candidates are still grinding Blind 75 without knowing its own author moved on from it. Meanwhile, NeetCode 150 from former Google engineer Navdeep Singh has become the other default recommendation you’ll see in every r\/cscareerquestions thread.<\/p>\n

So which one should you actually do? That depends almost entirely on how much time you have and what you’re trying to get out of prep.<\/p>\n

What Blind 75 Actually Is (and Isn’t)<\/h2>\n

Blind 75 started as a forum post. Yangshun noticed that people were grinding 300-plus LeetCode problems and still failing interviews, because they were memorizing solutions rather than learning patterns. His list curated 75 problems across 10 topic categories: Arrays, Binary, Dynamic Programming, Graph, Interval, Linked List, Matrix, String, Tree, and Heap. The idea was coverage through pattern recognition, not volume.<\/p>\n

It worked. The list spread fast on Teamblind, then Reddit, then everywhere. The Tech Interview Handbook repo<\/a> now has over 140,000 GitHub stars. That kind of adoption is not an accident. Blind 75 genuinely prepares you for the majority of what shows up in phone screens and early onsites at most companies.<\/p>\n

The limits, though, are real. Ten categories means some important patterns get thin coverage. Two pointers, sliding window, tries, backtracking, and advanced graph algorithms barely appear. If you hit an Amazon loop that goes heavy on trees and then throws a trie problem at you in round four, Blind 75 leaves you exposed. And because the list was built in 2018, there’s no native video walkthrough layer, no progression logic, and no built-in difficulty ramp.<\/p>\n

Yangshun’s own verdict: in May 2022, he published Grind 75 and flagged it as the better choice for most people. Grind 75 pulls from 169 problems ranked by popularity and interview frequency, then selects the best 75 with a difficulty-ordered progression instead of topic grouping. If you’re going to do “Blind 75 but updated,” Grind 75 is technically what you want. That said, the name recognition of the original hasn’t faded, and most people still encounter Blind 75 first.<\/p>\n

What NeetCode 150 Is<\/h2>\n

NeetCode 150 came from Navdeep Singh, a former Google engineer who started a YouTube channel in 2020 posting clean LeetCode walkthroughs. The channel grew past 770,000 subscribers. The 150-problem list, hosted on neetcode.io<\/a>, covers 18 categories: Arrays and Hashing, Two Pointers, Sliding Window, Stack, Binary Search, Linked List, Trees, Tries, Heap\/Priority Queue, Backtracking, Graphs, Advanced Graphs, 1-D Dynamic Programming, 2-D Dynamic Programming, Greedy, Intervals, Math and Geometry, and Bit Manipulation.<\/p>\n

Every problem has a free video solution by Navdeep himself. That’s a real differentiator. You don’t have to hunt YouTube for an explanation or parse a comments section to understand why a solution works. The video quality is consistent, the explanations build from brute force to optimal, and the progression within each category is intentional.<\/p>\n

The tradeoff is time. 150 problems is twice the volume. If you do four problems a day, you’re looking at six weeks minimum, and that’s optimistic. Realistically, people take 8 to 10 weeks. The 2-D dynamic programming section alone trips up candidates who haven’t fully internalized 1-D DP first, and the advanced graphs section covers Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford, and topological sort, which are not exactly light material.<\/p>\n

Coverage: Where the Gap Actually Shows Up<\/h2>\n

Here’s a specific comparison by category. Blind 75 has strong Arrays, Tree, and Dynamic Programming coverage. Decent Graph and String coverage. Thin everything else.<\/p>\n

NeetCode 150 inherits all of that and adds:<\/p>\n