My recent job search has led me on a journey to improve my coding interview skills. Interviewing is a skill that you can get better at by studying, preparing, and practicing for it. I used to think that being able to think, code, and communicate simultaneously was an impossible feat, until I realized that most people are just not good at coding interviews when they first start out. What’s worse is that as an interviewee, you’re encouraged to communicate your thought process out loud to the interviewer. It’s stressful to have to produce (working) code in an interview, while someone scrutinizes every keystroke that you make. Naturally, I have forgotten quite a bit about these algorithms and data structures, which I learned mostly during my freshmen and sophomore years of college. Many of the algorithmic concepts tested in coding interviews are not what I usually use at work, where I am a Front End Engineer (web). Experienced candidates can also expect System Design questions, but that is out of the scope of this post. In this post, I’ll be sharing the insights and tips I gained along the way.
Hence I spent the last three months figuring out how to improve my coding interview skills and eventually received offers from big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Lyft, Dropbox and more. So at that point, I decided to share what I'd learned in this article.Īnd I've just updated it for 2022 so it'll be super useful and relevant if you're job hunting now.ĭespite scoring decent grades in both my CS101 Algorithm class and my Data Structures class in university, I shudder at the thought of going through a coding interview that focuses on algorithms. Back in 2017, I went through some coding interviews and got offers from several large tech companies.