Technical Interviewing
Projected Time
About 2 Hours
Prerequisites
Motivation
Regardless of a person’s experience level, it’s important to be relatively comfortable answering the types of questions you can expect in a technical interview. The more of your mental energy that is focused on solving technical questions posed by an interviewer instead of trying to recall a basic concept of programming, the more confident you will feel and the more successful you’ll be.
Objectives
Participants will be able to:
- Solve problems using common data structures.
- Describe their thought process while solving a problem.
- Analyze their solution for performance improvements.
- Build a usable app that interacts with a public API.
- Demonstrate knowledge using a whiteboard.
Specific Things to Learn
- Whiteboarding
- Pair programming
- Code challenges
- Fetching data remotely and rendering
- Form submission
Materials
Lesson
Read through lesson slides Introduction to Technical Interviewing
Common Mistakes / Misconceptions
- Be careful to answer the question that’s being asked.
- Avoid assuming the question is one you have already practiced.
- Don’t rush.
- Make sure to come prepared with questions to ask as well. For example, find out as much as you can about what technologies and tools they use.
Guided Practice
Walk through several example questions and demonstrate successful and unsuccessful attempts to answer questions. Choose different types.
Independent Practice
Look through the materials sections of this guide and try a variety of different challenges. Do several questions for each website and then move on to the next one. Get comfortable with questions that feel and look unfamiliar.
Challenge
- Given an unsorted array of size ‘N’ of positive integers. One number ‘A’ from set {1, 2, … N} is missing and one number ‘B’ occurs twice in the array. Find these two numbers.
- Print all permutations of string in both the iterative and recursive way.
- Find the first non-repeated character in a given string.
Check for Understanding
Participants give each other whiteboard examples to solve and pair program using example questions. In each example, one participant will be the interviewer and another will be interviewed. Time the questions to get a sense of how an interview will feel.
Supplemental Materials