Techtonica’s Interview Prep Guide

Introduction

Preparing for technical interviews is the subject of countless guides. This is Techtonica’s guide, which is tailored to the audience of intensive training (or “bootcamp”) graduates but should be applicable generally.

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TL;DR Resource Link Dump

Looking for info on a topic? This is our main list of resources, both internal to our curriculum, and externally.

• Language Fundamentals
  • Array - common array functions in JavaScript
  • String - common string functions in JavaScript
  • Object-oriented or functional constructs (depends on your language(s))
  • Note: if you claim proficiency in JavaScript, you need to understand both well 😱
• Data Structures
  • Tree
  • Graph
  • Linked-List
  • Stack / Queue
• Algorithms - Searching & Sorting are the most common
• Whiteboarding
• Phone Screen Questions - brush up on your language/framework fundamentals
• Take Home Challenges - Techtonica Practice Examples

Why is prep needed?

Why is interview prep so important, even for grads who just spent 4 years learning Computer Science topics and so should know all of these concepts really well or veteran engineers who have written production systems to serve millions of users? Like the SAT, GRE, or other standardized tests, it’s not actually clear that high scores on them correlate with anything at all, but we use them anyway. If you don’t like this, when you are hiring your own engineers, use different mechanisms. Plenty do.

Some argue that prep is so important because becoming a more effective engineer at building real production code does not make you better at interview questions.

The only thing that reliably makes you better at interview questions is interview questions.

Organization

Interview prep and job searches in general reward Type A personality types. Give yourself a better chance of success by imposing some structure on your plan.

• Come up with a timetable and plan based on how many hours per day or week you can devote. Be realistic. Job searches, even in deal circumstances, can take weeks and months so think of this as a marathon vs a sprint.
• Use a task tracker - this can be a Trello board, Notion doc, or even a paper notebook
  • This is really helpful because tasks beget other tasks. For example, if you’re sprucing up the CSS on your portfolio page and notice it could use some more open-source contributions, you’d want to a place to capture those TODO’s without derailing your styling efforts
• No matter how much time you can devote, there will always be more tasks than time. Use your list to capture ideas but be intentional and thoughtful about how you spend your time

Typical Interview Process

Unfortunately, there is no typical interview process. Every company follows a different methodology and it often reflects the company culture. Some companies emulate the Big Tech style which weighs Computer Science and abstract analytical skills highly; other companies disagree that this selects for success and as a reaction try to create more a more “realistic” process and use take-home code challenges, pair programming, or other ways to assess

Big Tech Interviews

The big tech companies tend to utilize a process that emphasizes abstract technical problem-solving, often called “whiteboard problems.” If you want to know what the questions are like, it’s easy to find out. Most of them are leaked online.

• Word problem that often uses the company’s own domain. (Let’s say you’re building a social network with a blue logo…)
• The words are just there to obscure that they are usually just asking you to “Implement a binary search tree”
• Solve it in 20-30min with the ideal algorithm, explaning your thought process, catching edge cases, etc