Preparation for Lateral Hiring

It’s not that hard!

There are tons of resources available online for Campus placement interviews, but lateral hiring bar and expectation is entirely different from the campus Interviews. I am writing this blog to basically share my experience and resources which I covered for my preparation, which ultimately helped me grab an offer from both Goldman Sachs and Flipkart.

What’s the Difference?

While campus recruitment taps into only one source i.e. universities; lateral recruitment taps into multiple sources such as job sites, referrals, LinkedIn Profile, and company websites. In other words, Companies don’t want to spend their time and money for your training in lateral entries. Therefore, the bar for these lateral interviews is generally on the higher side.

Process?

This actually is a very vague answer since while Company A may really value efficient code, Company B may place more of an emphasis on high-level problem-solving skills. But the process generally starts with a 90 min long coding round to filter out noise.

Image By: law.com

Then comes the F2F interview rounds. This also is very much generalized based on companies to companies. Like in my case, I had 7 F2F rounds in Goldman Sachs while only 3 F2F rounds in Flipkart.

Resources?

In lateral hiring, the main focus is on PS/DS and System Design. For PS/DS you can just refer the same curriculum which you covered previously. But deciding factor is actually System Design in most of the cases.

PS/DS Resources :

• Basic Data Structures — arrays, linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, graphs, stacks, queues and heaps.
• Maths and Combinatorics — set theory, finite-state machines, regular expressions, matrix multiplication, bitwise operations, permutations, combinations, pigeonhole principle, Bayes Theorem, etc.
• Code these Algorithms — Binary Search, Euclid’s algorithm, BFS, DFS, Dijkstra’s shortest path, Binary tree traversals, Sorting Techniques, Max and Min Heap Implementation, Pattern Matching, Disjoint set, Memoization, Greedy algorithms, DP algorithms and Hashing Algo’s.
• Handbook for Algorithms
• List and Solutions of commonly asked Questions

System Design Resources :

• How the web works, Scalability.
• Distributed Systems, load balancers, Caching, Data partitioning, Sharding, CAP theorem, Consistent Hashing, Indexes, Proxies, Web-Sockets, CDN, etc.
• Cover DBMS — Normalization, Data modeling, Keys, NoSql vs Mysql
• Designing Microservices — Do a few examples of TinyURL, Airbnb, Instagram, Pastebin, etc. Also, go through Companies engineering Blogs.
• OOPS and Design Patterns.
• Learn how to handle the system design interview with a systematic approach in a short time
• Cheatsheet

Image Source: Donne Martin-Github

Miscellaneous resources -

• Coding Interview Process, Followup
• Interview Cheatsheet
• Feedback after interview

Thanks for reading through it. Please comment for any suggestion or to list additional Resources.