After a pretty successful career in Competitive Programming, I have found myself to suck at coding interviews. How was this even possible? The questions that I had to deal with in the Central European Olympiad were way tougher than these. Are coding interviews broken or am I?
Neither, I got comfortable.
Having solved all those tough questions, I was foolish enough to think Coding Interviews require the exact same set of fundamentals.
Can you imagine how well I explained my thinking process and how my code looked like?
Reading the variables in my code was like reading the alphabet: ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, … you got the idea. But I haven’t back then! And it cost me 2 years of doing well in every interview, but getting a quick confusing rejection.
4 things that I did to make the most out of every problem:
– be relentless in solving it without help
– see the patterns
– find different solutions
– obsess over the code. Write it as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I know it’s hard at start, by your own. Along with a friend, we launched a platform that helps people learn algorithms and ace coding interviews using step by step interactive tutorials and video content. Give it a shot: https://algocademy.com/
#algorithms #tech #interviews #faang