Mastering the Basics for Technical Interviews
It’s natural to want to focus on really tricky concepts when you’re preparing for interviews. You know you’re going to get some really hard problems, and so that’s the stuff that you want to practice! But we hear stories all the time about people who prepare for higher-level questions, only to completely blank out when they get questions about the basics. And we definitely don’t want that to happen to you!
You absolutely need to be able to answer questions about programming basics quickly and easily, because for most interviewers, this represents the baseline of what you should be able to do. And if you don’t perform well, this can automatically put you out of the running even if you’ve done well on the rest of the interview.
Consider the fizzBuzz conundrum that Imran Ghory and others have written about: A surprising amount of seemingly well-qualified applicants are unable to answer even trivial programming questions during technical interviews. An example of this sort of question is the old standby fizzBuzz, which asks the interviewee to write a program that takes a number n and print out the numbers from 1 to n, replacing multiples of 3 with fizz, multiples of 5 with buzz, and multiples of both 3 and 5 with fizzbuzz. (Go ahead, take a minute and do it. We know you want to.) While the odds that an interviewer actually asks you to solve fizzBuzz is pretty low since it’s well-trod territory at this point, it’s a good example of the level of this type of “basic” question.
Questions like this are aimed at making sure that you have a fundamental understanding of how to write code. The interviewer also wants to make sure that you can problem-solve in ways that take test cases and optimization into account. Since this sort of question is usually asked while you’re whiteboarding, interviewers also use this to gauge how you think while you’re working through a problem.
It’s also important that you actually know your favored interviewing language well. Can you write loops, use appropriate methods when they’re available to you, and use the right terminology when you’re discussing elements of the code you’re writing? If not, it’s going to show and the interviewer is going to pick up on it.
What basic things should you be really solid on in order to prepare for technical interviews? They tend to fall into a few basic categories:
- String manipulation (Generate permutations, find substrings, reverse a string, substitute specific letters…)
- Array manipulation or traversal
- Number manipulation
- Pattern matching (If necessary, be ready to write your own regular expression rather than using a regex library)
- Condition matching (Find the largest/smallest/missing element)
Remember, this represents the baseline of what you should know in order to succeed in an interview (not to mention on the job). You’ll actually need to know a lot more advanced stuff to ace the interview — and don’t worry, Interview Practice has you covered on that front too. But even if you do well on more advanced topics, if you don’t wow the interviewer on the simple ones they’re going to question how capable you actually are. So don’t neglect the basics! Here are some great examples on Interview Practice to get you started:
String manipulation:
- removeDuplicateAdjacent
- reverseSentence
- reverseVowelsOfString
- stringReformatting
- amendTheSentence
- longestCommonSubstring
- findSubstrings
- stringPermutations
- countVowelConstant
Array manipulation or traversal:
- rotateImage
- matrixElementsInSpiralOrder
- equilibriumPoint
- minSubstringWithAllCharacters
- findSubarrayBySum
Number manipulation:
Pattern matching:
Condition matching:
Tell us:
Have you ever encountered a basic programming question in an otherwise hard interview? How did you handle it? Let us know on the CodeFights forum!
Originally published at CodeFight On!.
