Before the Interview — Cracking the Coding Interview
Few points about the second chapter “Before the Interview” of book “Cracking the Coding Interview”.
Reference
The chapter “Before the Interview” is picked from Cracking the Coding Interview book written by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.
Highlights
- Acing an interview starts well before the interview itself — years before, in fact.
Getting the Right Experience
- Without a great resume, there’s no interview. And without great experience, there is no great resume.
- Getting a great experience is important to land the interview
For current students, this may mean the following:
- Take the Big Project Classes: big coding projects, more relevant to real world is better.
- Get an internship: Do everything you can to land an internship — early in school, if possible.
- Start something: build something or hackathons, or open source
For Professionals
- Having a well known company experience will not create a problem to shift. But if you are not at well known company, then following things you can do.
- Shift Work Responsibilities More Towards Coding: Without revealing to your manager that you are thinking of leaving, you can discuss your eagerness to take on bigger coding challenges.
- Use Your Nights and Weekends: Build something
Writing a Great Resume
- Resume screeners look for the same things that interviewers do.
Employment History:
For each role, try to discuss your accomplishments with the following approach: “Accomplished X by implementing Y which led to z:· Here’s an example:
• “Reduced object rendering time by 75% by implementing distributed caching, leading to a 10% reduction in log-in time:·
Here’s another example with an alternate wording:
• “Increased average match accuracy from 1.2 to 1.5 by implementing a new comparison algorithm based on windiff.
Not everything you did will fit into this approach, but the principle is the same: show what you did, how you did it, and what the results were. Ideally, you should try to make the results “measurable” somehow.
Projects:
- The projects should include your 2–4 most significant projects.
- Do not add too many projects.
Programming languages and softwares:
- Listing everything you’ve ever worked with is dangerous. Many interviewers consider anything on your resume to be “fair game” as far as the interview.
- One alternative is to list most of the languages you’ve used, but add your experience level. This approach is shown below:
- Languages: Java (expert}, C++ (proficient), JavaScript (prior experience).
Being Too Language Focused:
- When recruiters at some of the top tech companies see resumes that list every flavor of Java on their resume, they make negative assumptions about the caliber of candidate.
Knowing Only One or Two Languages:
- The more time you’ve spent coding, the more things you’ve built, the more languages you will have tended to work with.
- The assumption then, when they see a resume with only one language, is that you haven’t experienced very many problems.
Preparation Map
