I completed all coding interviews during the calls or online assessment. The phone rounds were purely leetcode type of questions. It’s pretty fast that phone interviews were scheduled. It was quite easy to pass the hr screen for all 3 companies. I realized it is perfect timing to validate my practice and accepted all hr phone screens. I got interview opportunities with Company A, Microsoft and Uber. In the mean time, I slowly heard from recruiters calls from some companies. It came to the end of my intense semester. It is the time for me to test my hard work. To simulate a more real interview, I periodically solve problems in whiteboard. Most of the time, I did Leetcode questions and contests on screen. Also, with a buddy, you won’t feel alone in the journey so you won’t give up easily. The summary talks about difference between bottom up vs top down solutions. An example is that when I had difficulty understanding DP questions even like coin change, my friend can share me summary of DP questions that he found online. We often discussed LCand shared resources like interview prep materials. Luckily, I have a buddy who was preparing for interviews and we leetcoded together. The advantage is that the contest provides the interview environment as it has time constraints. Most of the time, I get 2 questions solved, sometimes 3. I was never able to solve all four questions during the contest. Leetcode contestĭuring January to April, I attempted weekly contest as much as possible. By writing the code, it did reinforcement my understanding of the algorithms I learned. This slowdown is very critical for me to transition the memorization to practical problem solving skills in interview. My submissions were a lot less between Jan and April. I then started try to solve problem without reading the solutions. By then, I have briefly “solved” most tags and get the ability to identify the problem types by looking at the question. These two courses consumed 30+ hours weekly. The break and slow downĪround new year 2019, I started my semester when I took two hard courses Reinforcement Learning and Advanced Operating System. This helped me set the expectation of the interview so that I did not get any big surprise during the process. I personally started from this book a few years ago. It demonstrates the hiring process in great details and cover some strategy for preparation. Note: if you are very new to the interview process of the big tech companies, cracking the coding interview is your friend. But don’t get me wrong, I still need to wake up as early as 6 am to leetcode for those days. In my opinion, this is more effective for most of the people who are not guru in algorithms. (Besides leetcode, I have compiled this list of resources that helped me) I know some people may disagree with this point. Reading solution early on can actually help avoid that. Many people may feel frustrated as they cannot even solve easy problems at the very beginning. It also avoid the unnecessary frustration in early phase. So I could recognized variants of specific type of questions easily in the future. It saved me time and allow me to read many questions in the same tag. I found that it is extremely helpful for me to read solutions before attempting to solve the problems all by myself. So, my strategy was to read questions and most up-voted answers in the discussion to get the sense of questions tag by tag. It was quite hard to find enough time to tackle a single question from scratch. I started Leetcode as a daily routine early Nov 2018 while I was taking part time online master course Machine Learning at Georgia Tech and having full time job. This article is also available on my blog Leetcode as routine
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |