#180 We are truly in the Hackathon Era – Namanh Kapur interview
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2025
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Namanh Kapur. He's a senior software engineer at LinkedIn. He also creates YouTube videos to help devolopers with their careers.
We talk about:
- Tips for getting hired in the post-Leetcode world
- Tips for cold-DM'ing recruiters and for guessing their email addresses
- Why AI tools are going to lead to developers doing less repetitive work and more creative problem solving
- And which foundational developer skills he thinks you should priortize learning
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Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Namanh's video about two legendary Google engineers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK0I4f8Rbis
- Namanh Kapur on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/namanhkapur/?hl=en
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of Free Code Camp. |
| 0:06.2 | Today we're talking with Numan Kapoor. He's a senior software engineer at LinkedIn, and he creates |
| 0:12.3 | YouTube videos to help developers with their careers. We're going to talk about tips for getting |
| 0:16.4 | hired in the post-lead code world, tips for cold DMA recruiters and for guessing their email addresses, |
| 0:22.4 | why AI tools are going to lead to developers doing less repetitive work |
| 0:26.2 | and more creative problem solving, |
| 0:28.4 | and which foundational developer skills he thinks you should prioritize learning the most. |
| 0:33.4 | Numan Kapoor, welcome to the Free Code Camp podcast. |
| 0:36.5 | Thank you. Thank you. Very happy to be here. |
| 0:39.0 | Absolutely, man. |
| 0:39.8 | Well, first of all, you had an excellent video on your channel recently about a gentleman, |
| 0:46.2 | Roy Lee, who created a tool that allowed him to cheat on leak code interviews or like |
| 0:53.2 | the coding interview style Skype calls or you know |
| 0:57.6 | Zoom calls whatever Google meet whatever tool like if you're interviewing in Amazon I guess you'd |
| 1:01.4 | probably be using chime right so but basically it's like this this user interface that like |
| 1:06.1 | lays over the screen and you can move it around and when you're sharing your screen they can't |
| 1:10.2 | see it but you can see it and so you can move it around and when you're sharing your screen they can't see it. |
| 1:12.7 | But you can see it. |
| 1:17.8 | And so you can like basically, it'll look at the challenge that's on the screen. |
| 1:19.2 | Maybe that's a leak code problem. And then it'll use, you know, LLM to essentially pump out like a solution. |
| 1:24.5 | And then you can just like type that solution and you can act all natural while you're totally cheating on the interview. Now I just want to say I have a teacher |
| 1:32.8 | that is my career up until like age 31. I was a teacher and a school director and I absolutely |
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