Acing the Technical Interviews

A crucial problem being faced by the entire aspiring software community, is how to tackle the technical interviews. After being on both sides of the interview table for nearly a decade, I’ve come to realize that there’s not a lack of content for coding interview prep. If anything, there’s too much — a simple google search for “coding interview questions” nets 282 million search results!

What there seems to be a lack of, however, is guidance, teaching grit, and immersive interview experiences. The technical interviews are more than just coding skills. Let's break down the process. There appear to be the three problems that are still preventing engineers from performing well in technical interviews:

First, by guidance, I mean getting programmers to the point where they’re even comfortable approaching any algorithm challenge. It’s hard to implement a Binary Search Tree if you can’t write a class with pointers. In my opinion, textbooks and most online materials do a terrible job here by incorporating the mathematical theory too early on or making the concepts intimidating.

For this, I highly recommend starting from the basics of Data Structures, understand their ins & outs, see their use cases, their traversal mechanism, and then step up to different algorithms including sorting, DFS, BFS etc. Best way is to select a language of your choice and actually implement while you learn. And while you're at it, keep in mind the complexity of your algorithms. Start with the obvious solution, then the optimal, the better. The Big O matters more than you think!

Secondly, by teaching grit, I’m talking about actually sitting down and forcing oneself to actually DO the problems. There are several platforms out there including LeetCode, HackerRank, AlgoExpert etc. You can create a free account and tackle numerous algorithmic problems in the language of your choice. It certainly helps in polishing your skills around common data structures and problem solving. You can also try AlgoDaily’s daily emails which help a bit with this, and give a gentle nudge to people in the morning. The more problems you've solved, the more confident you'll feel and more optimal solutions you'll have up your sleeve.

Third, you may be hitting a AlgoExpert or Leetcode challenge every day, but you’re still not getting the full interview experience until you’ve done a few mock interviews. This gives you the full immersive interview experience, and learning to deal with this added pressure is definitely essential. This is where the presentation matter, how well you can communicate your understanding of the problem, and your approach towards it's solution.

Conclusively, we mostly fear in the face of technical interviews because of lack of aforementioned practices, so starting off with the disciplined regiment with a proper process helps overcome that fear. We also often try to over-complicate the solutions in order to sound smart, but mind you, this is the greatest killer of your pitch. Simpler is always better!