Coding Interviews Are Easier Than You Think

Key Takeaways

coding interviews are really hard and that's why there are numerous videos on youtube talking about how coding interviews are broken and nobody knows this better than me because i was rejected in more than 100 interviews myself despite spending countless hours on interview preparation i had nothing to show for it and this is the reason i hated coding interviews like most people but i have never excelled at anything that i hate doing and complaining as a strategy has never worked for me i knew that i needed to change my perspective if i really wanted to do well in coding interviews so i engineered a complete mindset shift in the way i look at coding interviews and i must say i love coding interviews now as a result i always feel motivated when i have to prepare for coding interviews this has worked wonders for me not only did i land a job as a software engineer i managed to crack coding interviews at google facebook and amazon that's why i made this video today i want to tell you all the reasons why i love coding interviews first reason i love coding interviews is because they make software engineering accessible to everyone can you imagine breaking into let's say civil engineering without a formal degree it's next to impossible to do so but in software engineering you'll find many people like me who have no formal training in programming and are able to do so and that's because coding interviews test fundamental skills rather than technology specific skills i still remember the very first coding style interview question i attempted it was related to rotation of an array i spent an entire day trying to solve the question but i failed next morning i gave the same question to a friend with no programming experience and he gave me the algorithm in 20 minutes he could not code it up for me but we could see that the algorithm worked and that's the beauty of coding interviews you don't have to master any particular language because languages come and go you also don't need to be an expert at a particular technology like react or angular who knows how long they'll be around all you need to be is a problem solver and you'll have your foot in the door second reason why i love coding interviews is because they are same no matter where you go if i show you video recordings of coding interviews from let's say uber versus microsoft you'll not be able to tell me which one is which from the candidates coding interviews require no guesswork on what to expect in the interview first five minutes are an icebreaker introduction which let's be honest nobody cares about then there will be 30 to 40 minutes of coding exercise for which you know the format beforehand the last 10 minutes are reserved for any questions you might have let's compare this to interviews for other jobs i actually majored in mechanical engineering in college in mechanical engineering interviews the questions could range from robotics to thermodynamics to whatever else the interviewer is in the mood for there was no fixed format which means that i had no clue about what would be thrown at me in the interview what this meant was that i was always very anxious before the interview and would blank out fortunately i don't have to suffer any of that in coding interviews because i know what to expect and this brings me to the third reason why i love coding interviews there's literally just one course that you need to prepare for coding interviews and this makes the preparation very simple and that courses data structures and algorithms compared to different courses i had to prepare for mechanical engineering interviews it's nothing some of you might say what about the questions related to concurrent programming threads and locks etc in my experience 99 of coding interviews never require anything outside data structures and algorithms some might argue that even though it's only one course it's very vast and requires mastery of different algorithms but i agree with that to some extent but if you look a little closer there are only a dozen coding interview patterns that you really need to know about there's this article on hacker known by fahim who's the founder of educated which is a great website to check out in his article fahim lists the only 14 coding interview patterns you need to know to ace any programming interview these patterns include sliding window two pointers and cyclic sort etc and if you ask for my opinion i am a strong believer in pareto principle which says that 80 of the outcomes come from 20 percent of work so if you carefully pick the most has 8-10 patterns out of these 14 you are good to crack most of the coding interviews 10 patterns or one course is all you need to craft coding interviews and i love it next reason why i love coding interviews is because they are very objective in most coding interviews they make you run your code and test it at the end in some cases they already have some inbuilt test cases that your code automatically gets tested on they ask you to write your own test cases whatever the case may be at the end of your coding interviews you know how you did that's because your code either passed all the test cases or didn't there are no gray areas now compare this to system design interviews that software engineers go through for mid or senior level roles there's almost no clarity on what's expected and whether your solution is correct or not entirely depends on what your interviewer thinks the same solution can be exceptional for one interview and impractical for others one more reason why i love coding interviews is because it's so easy to prepare for them there are so many different resources you can use for preparation if you're looking to learn data structure and algorithms you can go to udacity and do this course by google if you don't like this more interactive way of learning you can always go to coursera and do this course by princeton university and the best part is you can access all this for free you might say that online courses are there for so many majors not just computer science i want more help well you can go to resources like hacker rank or lead code for intro preparation these resources are partially free if you like practicing in two questions is fine i want to see some past questions asked by a particular company you can do that too after doing interview preparation if you're still under confident and want to do some mock practice interviews there are some resources for that as well if you're still not ready well the only other thing you can do is maybe hire someone else to give interviews for you but i don't recommend that sixth reason why i love coding interviews is because they are very collaborative in nature your interviewer is always there to help and guide you to the solution i still remember this coding interview i had at a very popular fintech company as i was working on solving the coding problem i defined a helper function that i use in my main function the interview figured out that i was going to need some more helper functions that are just a small variation of the helper function i just wrote so he wrote all those functions for me as i was working on the main function i used all the helper functions he defined and when we compiled and tested the entire code it worked as expected teamwork is what saved me that day because without the interviewer's help there's no way i could have finished the solution i'm not aware of any other kind of job interviews where this happens and that's why i love it perhaps the coding interviews were designed to be a preview to the actual job because all the people i have worked with in the tech industry have been very collaborative and helpful another reason why i love coding interviews is because the coding problems are so much fun to solve to me coding interviews are no different than solving a wordle for those of you who don't know wordle is a very popular game where you get 6 chances to get a 5 letter word like in wordle you start with something sub-optimal in the context of a coding interview that would be similar to coming up with a brute force solution then as you do in wordle you look for some clues you look at the coding problem and your solution to see if there are any clues that you might have missed you also consider hints your interviewer is giving and slowly but steadily you reach the final solution on some days you solve the wordle in three tries on others it takes you six but if you pay attention to the hints you end up solving the word most days the same is true for coding interviews on the days you can't solve wordle do you start questioning your abilities begin hating the word and stop playing it for good no you come back the next day have a go at it again because you enjoy the experience of doing so then why do anything different with your coding interviews if you learn to enjoy your coding interviews like you enjoy a wordle you'll celebrate your wins and the failures won't even matter to you you'll start doing the coding interviews for the sheer fun of it at that point you'll stop taking rejections personally come back again and again to play this fun game of coding interviews i managed to reach that stage and that's why i love coding interviews now if you want to know how i became a software engineer at google without a cs degree you can watch this video at the top if you want to see my 5 year coding journey you can watch this other one at the bottom i'll see you in the next one [Music] you