Skip to content

Comment on A Strategy For The Dreaded Interview Coding Question

Comments

Yes. Having been on both sides of the process a lot recently, I'd agree that restating / asking questions / talking through the problem as you do it is helpful. But beyond that, I think that simply practicing typical whiteboard questions is the best preparation. You can find a lot of these simply by googling, or, by looking at a typical CS algorithms or data structures textbook. Re-familiarize yourself with lists, trees, etc... and basic searching/sorting algorithms. Steve Yegge offers similar advice here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

Yegge's post is a classic but getting a bit old. I highly recommend "Cracking the Coding Inteview" [http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming-...] for serious prepping.

Edit: It looks like the author of the above has a newer book out called "The Google Resume", probably worth taking a look at too.

Love the Yegge posts on interviewing, and I completely agree. There are all kinds of things on the technical side that would be interviewers should brush up on, I'm just preaching having a strategy to run thru when actually answering the question instead of haphazardly diving into code.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.