Skip to content

Notes on preparing for coding interviews during my PhD

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

hassony2/interview-prep

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

Coding interview prep

Coming from a mathematics background with limited academic coding training, I discovered that internships at companies that I was interested in relied on coding interviews for recruitement, including for research positions during my PhD.

Although I code a significant part of the day for my research, preparing for the coding interviews is an entirely different, and very specific exercise.

While preparing for coding interviews, I kept notes of useful (to me!): resources, comments and code snippets.

I successfully passed the interviews for Google and Facebook internships 4 months appart, and I found myself giving advice to other PhD students about how to prepare for coding interviews.

A targetted search will show that there are a lot of great resources for preparing the coding interviews ! This is a collection of resources that I subectively found useful.

How I prepared

For the Google interviews I had roughly the following preparation:

  • 1/2 days of finding good resources
  • ~5 weeks during which I practiced for ~1h-1h30 every morning and 3-5 hours per day on weekends

What I knew before starting

I did not start from zero:

Before preparing for the Google interviews (2 years before) I had read a part of Cracking the Coding Interview, the whole introduction, and at several exercises (with solutions) per chapter.

This means I was already at least somewhat familiar with most basic data structures (lists, linked-lists, stacks, trees, ...).

Learn about data structures, algorithms

Practice interview questions

  • Geeks for Geeks top 10 algorithms in interview questions
    • I cycled through questions for each chapter, to make sure I had a similar coverage of all the topics
  • LeetCode
    • I payed for the Premium account, and sorted the questions by frequency for the company I was targetting
    • I did maybe ~30% easy, 60% medium, 10% hard questions, and would stop when the code would pass the tests
    • Given that for Google you are coding in a Google doc, I would read the question in LeetCode, then write the code in a GDoc, and then copy-paste the code in LeetCode to pass it through the tests
    • Leetcode also has a mock interview mode that is timed and provides a set of 2/3 questions which I found useful because it is closer to the real interview setting (you don't know in advance if the question is hard or not, which I find is an important prior knowldege which you don't get during the real interview, and a timer)
    • I would try to solve them in real-conditions, including often speaking to an imaginary interviewer aloud in front of my computer (talking and solving the problem at the same time required some practice)
  • I did not solve problems from Cracking the Coding Interview at this time, but I did go through my notes on the exercises I had solved previously to refresh my memory on these classical exercises
  • I also liked the following list from the Tech Interview Handbook although I didn't follow their suggested exercise list

Last minute tips

About

Notes on preparing for coding interviews during my PhD

Topics

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Languages