A great way to make your bullet points actually stand out, is to use the C.A.R method that Yihua talks about in his article here on getting hired at FAANG companies. So with that in mind, let’s walk through the best step-by-step process to solving each interview question, regardless of if you’ve practiced it before. Get organized And here's some general advice to consider: you are going to be dealing with people who may be pretty tired of interviews. Smile if you can. Try to show enthusiasm. Have a conversation, and try to talk to the interviewer the way you might communicate if the two of you were pair programming, but they were more senior. How to Start Your Interview Prep Their programming interview prep questions are carefully selected to teach you exactly what you need to know to crush your coding interviews. This coding interview course comes with detailed video walkthroughs for every solution, a coding environment, and articles that break down how to think through each question. This post is structured into the following two sections. Feel free to skip ahead to the section that interests you.

The aim here is to familiarize yourself with the interview process and take action. Procrastination won’t help, and your first attempts will need improvement. But it’s essential to start somewhere. Can you answer the question and solve the problem? Brilliant! Even if it took you a few hours. Again, with practice, you'll get fasterOne of the basic fundamentals of programming is data structures. They are used to store and organize data in a meaningful way. Some important data structures which are a must for coding interviews are: They’re usually less interested that you solved a problem correctly. They care more about your thought process and your approach to how you solved it. Remember that it’s not about getting something perfect right away. It’s about finding the best solution when critically analyzing the problem. freeCodeCamp is a donor-supported tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity organization (United States Federal Tax Identification Number: 82-0779546) Every interview I’ve gone through since I started studying your problem set has included a variation of the questions on Interview Cake! There was one problem that wasn’t on here, but I was able to solve it because of the themes you taught. Today I am accepting an offer at a startup in SF!”– Ulises

Hey! I'm the creator of Learn to Code With Me, a blog for beginners teaching themselves how to code. This isn’t about spamming them or being pushy. It’s just showing professional courtesy and staying top of mind.This is Alex Lee using hashmaps in Java. He does not explain the internals of how they actually work, but he provides practical advice on how to actually use them. Focus instead on having a consistent framework for answering the questions (like Yihua teaches you above) and then for practice, prioritize questions asked by the top FAANG companies first. If you’re going in person, make sure you have everything ready before you head off. Charger cables, headphones, notebook, etc. The day of the interview: 2 hours before With real-life-scenario-based questions, strategies to respond to interview questions, and over 300 interview questions (coding and HR-based), this book preps you for a coding interview in C++. 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.

Before taking this coding interview preparation course, you should be familiar with basic data structures, Big O notation, and ideally Python and/or Java, which you’ll be using to solve problems. The thing is, when most people talk about a coding interview, they’re actually referring to just one aspect of potentially a few different steps in the coding interview process… I recommend a progressive system of assessment, with a timer and self reflection. Start with a certain type of question (ex: arrays). Go ahead and set a 30-minute timer, then work through questions like so: A final chat and opportunity for you to ask any questions (you should always have questions to ask) If you follow the approach above, you should be in excellent standing to both solve your technical questions and show competence with the interviewer.If you read it, you should probably ignore the "string compression" story, which does not add much to the article. Personally, I’m a big believer in the task expanding to fit the time you give it, so if you can do it, I personally recommend going all-in. Give yourself a 30-day window and do a few hours each night (or day if you don't currently have a job). Instead, we recommend that you use a framework for working through different types of technical questions so that you can actually solve problems you've never seen before. This is exactly what Yihua teaches in his FAANG Interview Prep course. The questions in the book have been carefully selected so that they represent the most frequently asked questions in Python coding interviews. Solutions are clearly explained with plenty of diagrams and comments in the code so that you can easily understand. After that, I recommend looking at the most popular questions from each topic section: arrays, hash tables, etc. Look at those and try to answer 5-10 of the most popular, then move on to the next topic.