Coding interview

Interview process

Product Manager / Dev Leads

• Listen (dont talk in middle)
• Be Confident
• Be speedy
• Practice Pen/paper coding
• Without a great resume, there's no interview. And without great experience, there's no great resume
  • Big Project (better if realworld)
  • 1 page (if less than 10 yrs exp)
  • Employment history (not every thing but most important ones)
  • Avoid
    • Enterprise languages like vbnet, .net
    • Too focused on one language only....like specific versions
    • certifications
  • resume template (opens new window)

Behaviour questions

• In Story format
  • Situation
  • Task
  • Action
  • Result
• talk about projects
• Ask questions. Do prepare a list.
  • Genuine
  • Insightful
  • Passion
• Specific nor arrogant
• Your role not team
• Tell me about yourself ?
  • Current role (in company) - 1-2 lines
  • College - 1-2 lines
  • after college
  • Current role (detailed)
  • Outside of work (hackathons, stackoverflow, etc)
  • Wrap up (why new job?)

Technical questions

• Absolute basics

  Data structure	Algorithm	Concepts
  Linked Lists	Breadth-First Search	Bit Manipulation
  Trees, Tries, & Graphs	Depth-First Search	Memory (Stack vs. Heap)
  Stacks & Queues	Binary Search	Recursion
  Heaps	Merge Sort	Dynamic Programming
  Vectors / Arraylists	Quick Sort	Big O Time & Space
  Hash Tables (Most imp)

• Powers of 2 / Memory limits / Scalability

  Powers of 2	Exact value	Approx value	Memory
  7	128	-	-
  8	256	-	-
  10	1024	1 thousand	1 KB
  20	1,048,576	1 million	1 MB
  30	-	1 billion	1 GB

• Problem solving

  1. Listen
  2. Example
     • Use numbers, strings.
     • NOT a special case.
  3. Brute force
  4. Optimize (BUD)
     • Bottlenecks / Unnecessary work / Duplicated work
     • How will it be in real world ? (searching in dictionary book is a binary search )
     • Try base case (like n=1)
     • Which data structure/algo is best ?
  5. Walkthrough
  6. Implement
  7. Test
     • Small cases
     • Special & edge cases

Offers and rejection

• Deadline - Company gives time of 1-4 weeks to reply for offer
• Decline offer - Say I think startup could be better for me. (Non-offensive).(Maybe after 1-2 years)
• Rejection - Reapply after some time. Ask for feedback if possible.
• Package
  • 1-time perks - signing / relocation
  • Base salary
  • Annual Bonus (3-30% of base salary)
  • Cost of living
  • Taxes
  • Stocks/equity (3-4 years)
• On Job
  • Promotions
  • Career path in 2-3 years
  • Relationships & networks
  • Keep interviewing atleast 1 in a year for practice