
Ask HN: How do you prepare for interviews? - hazard
How do you prepare for technical interviews, especially those that you know will involve whiteboard coding? How much time do you invest in reviewing algorithms that you haven&#x27;t used in a while? What are the best prep resources?
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zxcvcxz
As someone with horrible social anxiety that can barely talk without
stuttering when under pressure I typically have a few shots of whiskey.

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ChristianGeek
Just make sure it's not on your breath.

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BraveNewCurency
> How much time do you invest in reviewing algorithms that you haven't used in
> a while?

None. I don't want to work at companies that only hire people who memorized
Red-Black trees.

If you don't remember, just say so. Try to reason about it, stating what you
do know and can calculate on the back of an envelope. (I know quicksort is
faster than N^2). You don't even need a google search to look up the details
on an algorithm. Knowing when to use what algorithm is far more important.

In other words, it's just like they said in school: Show your work. Tell us
how you arrived at your answer. Tell us how confident you are in the answer.

If you do want to practice, open a (non-highlighting) text editor and code
something trivial. See if you can get it to compile on the first time. Repeat
with other small problems. (This is how we did it in the old days.)

> What are the best prep resources?

Your stories. Passion projects you've completed. Interesting debugging
techniques. What you did when the answer was not in the documentation.

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solomatov
>None. I don't want to work at companies that only hire people who memorized
Red-Black trees.

Actually, RedBlack trees shouldn't be memorized. You can infer them from
scratch, if you really understand motivation behind them. They can be modeled
as a way to represent 2-3-4 trees in binary tree form. In this way, it's very
easy to implement both inserts and removes.

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echeese
Note: This is all just from personal experience in interviews. I'm not an
interviewer, I'm an interviewee.

The fact you have an interview in the first place is a good sign - your résumé
showed that you have the skills they need. A lot of the time, an interview is
used to determine if you're a good fit socially. As for whiteboard coding,
it's just used to show your thinking. Even if you screw it up, as long as you
can explain what your thought process was they won't mind.

Anyways, I find the best thing you can do is research the company, come up
with a few good questions, and tell the interviewer how it would be great to
work with them. If they hit you with a curveball during the interview code
test, you probably wouldn't want to work there anyways.

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SQL2219
They have to like you, focus on that. I've been on interviews where I am very
technically qualified, but the interviewers didn't care for my personality.
This is one area that I am working on. Someone posted the following article
which explains a lot of this:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/guess-
who-d...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/guess-who-doesnt-
fit-in-at-work.html?_r=0)

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loumf
What I tell people is not to worry about their specific tech knowledge -- that
should be something that you have more naturally.

The biggest issue I see is not being able to be coherent in explaining a tech
project or concept. I would practice succint answers to technical questions.

In addition, if you are not comfortable coding in front of someone and
explaining as you go, practice it with friends in mock interviews.

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hazard
So no one feels that stuff like "Cracking the Coding Interview" is really that
helpful?

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morkfromork
Practice by interviewing with a few companies you don't really care about
getting an offer from.

Disassemble their products and research whatever tech they used to build them
for strengths & weaknesses.

Dig up whatever background info you can on the people who will be interviewing
you.

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danielbnelson
They vary so much by company there's nothing really in common that you can
focus on to prep. I've been on a few interviews where I actually wrote code.

