Practice Coding Questions — The Complete Guide to Technical Interview Preparation
This marks the third chapter of The Complete Guide to Technical Interview series. When it comes to technical interview preparation, most people will think about practicing as many coding questions as possible.
It’s partially right because you certainly need to practice. However, very few people do it correctly. But, with the right approach, you can practice smartly and improve your skills within a short period.
Why Practice Coding Questions?
The harsh truth about coding interviews is that questions asked in the interview are not directly related to software engineers’ day-to-day work. You will rarely implement a recursion algorithm in a real project and the most commonly used data structure is not a tree, stack, or queue, it’s an array.
The most cost-efficient way to evaluate an engineer is still through coding questions because not all companies can afford to give each and every candidate a one-month internship to evaluate his/her skills.
What it means is that unless a better form of interview is invented, coding questions are still the primary screening criteria. To survive in this game, you have to get used to those types of questions that you may never encounter in real-life projects.
Earlier there were not many resources online and people didn’t know what and how to prepare.
But now, you can find multiple resources online. You will find more questions than you can practice. The point is that you don’t need to finish every question you’ve seen online, nor do you need to go through all those online resources.
Instead, all you need to do is to follow the 80/20 rule that says that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
Through this article, we’d like to help you identify that 20% you need to focus on.
Write Down The Code
A lot of people are way too afraid to get their hands dirty. When practicing coding questions, all they do is to solve problems “with their minds”. If they have come up with a theoretical solution, they think they’ve solved the question.
On the contrary, We’ve seen so many people who have failed to write down solid code even if their thoughts are in the right direction.
It takes enough practice to be able to code accurate algorithms within a given time. Stats show that only 10% of programmers can write binary searches without a bug. We hope that this data point will make you pay more attention to the preparation that you put in for the coding test.
To Summarize:
You don’t need to practice all the questions available online. Instead, preparing with the right resources can save you tons of time and that’s why we think everyone should be extremely picky about choosing the most appropriate online resources.
Profile your strengths and weaknesses accurately. Fix a clear goal and define a proper practice roadmap to reach your goal. Remember, structured preparation always yields better results.
If you are looking for guidance from experienced interviewers, don't miss the opportunity to join us at our event “The Technical Interview: An Enigma Explained” which is scheduled to be held in the month of March.
For more details write to us at event@inlustro.co
