Should I focus on competitive programming or interview-focused DSA?

For product companies like Google and Meta, yes, DSA is part of the frontend interview process, but the difficulty is lower than for backend roles. Easy to medium problems are the typical expectation. Beyond that, what really matters for frontend roles is JavaScript depth: closures, the event loop, promises, prototypal inheritance. Add React fundamentals, basic CSS knowledge, and some understanding of how browsers work, and you're covering most of what frontend interviews actually evaluate. Service-based and mid-tier companies rarely test DSA heavily for frontend positions.

You should be comfortable with arrays, strings, linked lists, stacks, queues, trees, graphs, recursion, dynamic programming, and binary search patterns. Being able to solve medium-level problems consistently without needing hints is a reasonable benchmark for product companies. For service-based companies, strong easy-level comfort is enough. The real test is whether you can recognize the pattern in an unfamiliar problem, not whether you've memorized specific solutions.

For software engineering roles at product-based companies, skipping DSA is not a realistic option. It's the primary filter and there's no way around it. For non-coding roles like QA, business analyst, or product management, the situation is different and domain knowledge matters more. For service-based companies, very basic DSA combined with good aptitude scores and communication skills can get you through, but even there it's better to have it than not.