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How Technical Interviews Work

There is a lot of information out there regarding technical interviews and these guides are much better at advice than I can ever give. The main one I can recommend is “Cracking the Coding Interview”; it is an invaluable resource while preparing for these interviews.

That said, I wanted to give a quick rundown of what I know about the interview process based on personal experience.

The overall process 

Automated resume screening

Most people will apply online to these companies and submit their resume for an automatic review process. People suggest that using a difficult to understand format (for a machine) for your resume is a bad idea. There is probably some keyword matching and some ML thrown in there. Regardless, I dont think there is much you can do to optimize your resume for this step. Make a good resume (for a human reviewer) and that should be good enough for the algorithm as well.

If you can get a referral into the company, you can skip this step altogether. Take a look at my post about how-referrals-work for a detailed explaination.

Recruiter resume screening

Similar to the above, having an objectively good resume is the way to go here. Look up some guides on good resume practices. Take a look at eye movement heat maps for recruiters, it really puts things into perspective.

Online test/quiz

This is usually just a very preliminary weeding out process. Take a look at Google Code Jam questions for some examples and a basic idea of the difficulty level. You typically get 2 questions and 2+ hours to solve them. I believe most people with reasonable programming skills should be able to solve these questions. If you cannot solve these in 2 hours without the pressure of an actual interview, you really need to brush up your programming/problem solving skills.

Technical interviews (2 for internship, 4/5 for full time)

This is the most important step of the entire process, and the one most people fail at. I feel there is no subsitute for practice through actual interviews and mock interviews for this. No amount of coding problems or programming competitions will prepare you for ‘interviewing’ well. For that you need to be comfortable not only approaching the problem well and solving it, but also speaking out loud all through it.

Remember the process of solving a problem is more important than the actual solution to the interviewer. They already checked that you can solve programming problems in the online quiz. Now they are trying to judge you on a different scale. If you stay quiet for 5-10 miutes and come up with the optimal solution, the interviewer will probably not be impressed. What’s better is to spend 10-15 minutes discussing the problem at hand and possible solution with the interviewer and making sure you get to the solution with the interviewer in tow, not just inform them when you are done.

Hopefully, a good set of mock interviews early enough should tell you about your weak areas and you can work on them. I can only give a general set of tips on stuff that I feel people commonly miss out on.

A interview can have one or two questions. Often there is one standard

programming question and then one system design question (sometimes this is skipped for interns). In other cases, the interviewer will give you a simple question and then once you’re done with it, they will introduce some special case or variation to see how you adapt to changing requirements. Learn to properly judge which kind of question the interviewer is asking and time yourself correctly.Related to the above, don’t lose track of time. That doesn’t mean that you keep freaking out about the ticking clock, but don’t keep talking and talking until there are 5 minutes left in the interview. Set a time limit to when you will begin writing code. Judge how much time the interviewer expects you to spend on a question (see above), and spend at most 30-40 percent discussing possible solutions. For example, in a 1 hour interview if you feel the question is 30 minutes long, decide to start writing code on the board at the 10 minutes mark. Expect to spend 10 minutes writing code, and then 10 more minutes running tests and discussing runtime. Don’t jump to the best/optimal solution immediately. Even if you know what the best solution is, it’s best to mention the brute force or suboptimal solutions (no matter how obvious they seem to you), and then quickly also tell them why you rejected those. That will tell the interviewer you know exactly why the solution you come up with is the best.That said, if you can’t come up with a solution you think is optimal, don’t waste all the interview discussing/thinking about it. An implemented suboptimal solution is many times better than a unimplemented optimal one.If on a board, write down the question/details as the interviewer tells you. Write down everything you think is important. Learn to ask questions that will define the problem more, for example if the input will only be integers, the ranges etc. This will give you time where you can keep talking slightly ‘mindlessly’ and you can think in advance about the solutions.Write down test cases before anything else. No need to write working code for test cases. Stuff like foo(“input”) => “expected_output” is completely fine. This will ensure you have a starting point for the logic as well as ensure that you and the interviewer are on the same page regarding the problem.Write down test cases for each corner case. I cannot emphasise how important good test cases are. Writing test cases first and dry running them before telling the interviewer you are done will automatically put you ahead of most people. Interviewers love Test-Driven-Developement.Practice talking out loud when thinking about the problem at the same time. Most people are used to being left alone and staring at the screen in silence and then comng up with a solution. That doesn’t work in an interview. Don’t be silent for more than 5-7 seconds. Even when writing code keep talking about what it does. Bonus points if you relate it to the test cases you wrote in the start, for example “This if condition handles the base case tested in that test case…”. Start running the test cases on your own when you feel you are done. Don’t wait for the interviewer to tell you to test your code. The same goes for runtime. Once you are done with the test cases, discuss the runtime (talk with the interviewer and take him through how you figure out the runtime for your solution), and then write it down in Big-O notation.If the interviewer says ANYTHING when you are writing the code or discussing test cases or possible solutions, take careful note of it. Nothing an interviewer says is useless. It is more often than not a carefully thought out comment to point out some mistake or to nudge you in the correct direction.If you are completely blank and cannot think of any solution, starting running the problem through the data structures you know and try to find if there is any which has a special property which makes the solution obvious. Most problems are actually just applying the proper data structure.Team matching

This is the good part. You have cleared the technical interviews and are deemed fit for hire by the company. Now you will be added to the pool of accepted candidates and team with open positions can review your interests/skills and contact you for a chat if they think there’s a match.

How many teams you are contacted by/can talk to depends on the office you are applying to. A bigger office means you get more choice with deciding. Sometimes you only get one shot at a team matching interview, so don’t be too picky, but don’t sign up to work with a team you absolutely have nothing in common with.

This step might be skipped if you are converting from an intern position to full time and your team specifically requested to hire you, or if you were hand picked from the industry for a specific team.

Offer

Congratulations, it is time for offer. Once a team has agreed to hire you, and you have indicated that you want to join them as well, your recruiter will discuss the offer with you. There is room for negotiations, but it depends a lot on your background and other competing offers. If you are a fresh grad with no other competing offers from a similar big company, you don’t have much room for negotiation.

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There is a lot of information out there regarding technical interviews and these guides are much better at advice than I can ever give. The main one I can recommend is “Cracking the Coding Interview”; it is an invaluable resource while preparing for these interviews.

That said, I wanted to give a quick rundown of what I know about the interview process based on personal experience.

The overall process 

Automated resume screening

Most people will apply online to these companies and submit their resume for an automatic review process. People suggest that using a difficult to understand format (for a machine) for your resume is a bad idea. There is probably some keyword matching and some ML thrown in there. Regardless, I dont think there is much you can do to optimize your resume for this step. Make a good resume (for a human reviewer) and that should be good enough for the algorithm as well.

If you can get a referral into the company, you can skip this step altogether. Take a look at my post about how-referrals-work for a detailed explaination.

Recruiter resume screening

Similar to the above, having an objectively good resume is the way to go here. Look up some guides on good resume practices. Take a look at eye movement heat maps for recruiters, it really puts things into perspective.

Online test/quiz

This is usually just a very preliminary weeding out process. Take a look at Google Code Jam questions for some examples and a basic idea of the difficulty level. You typically get 2 questions and 2+ hours to solve them. I believe most people with reasonable programming skills should be able to solve these questions. If you cannot solve these in 2 hours without the pressure of an actual interview, you really need to brush up your programming/problem solving skills.

Technical interviews (2 for internship, 4/5 for full time)

This is the most important step of the entire process, and the one most people fail at. I feel there is no subsitute for practice through actual interviews and mock interviews for this. No amount of coding problems or programming competitions will prepare you for ‘interviewing’ well. For that you need to be comfortable not only approaching the problem well and solving it, but also speaking out loud all through it.

Remember the process of solving a problem is more important than the actual solution to the interviewer. They already checked that you can solve programming problems in the online quiz. Now they are trying to judge you on a different scale. If you stay quiet for 5-10 miutes and come up with the optimal solution, the interviewer will probably not be impressed. What’s better is to spend 10-15 minutes discussing the problem at hand and possible solution with the interviewer and making sure you get to the solution with the interviewer in tow, not just inform them when you are done.

Hopefully, a good set of mock interviews early enough should tell you about your weak areas and you can work on them. I can only give a general set of tips on stuff that I feel people commonly miss out on.

A interview can have one or two questions. Often there is one standard

programming question and then one system design question (sometimes this is skipped for interns). In other cases, the interviewer will give you a simple question and then once you’re done with it, they will introduce some special case or variation to see how you adapt to changing requirements. Learn to properly judge which kind of question the interviewer is asking and time yourself correctly.Related to the above, don’t lose track of time. That doesn’t mean that you keep freaking out about the ticking clock, but don’t keep talking and talking until there are 5 minutes left in the interview. Set a time limit to when you will begin writing code. Judge how much time the interviewer expects you to spend on a question (see above), and spend at most 30-40 percent discussing possible solutions. For example, in a 1 hour interview if you feel the question is 30 minutes long, decide to start writing code on the board at the 10 minutes mark. Expect to spend 10 minutes writing code, and then 10 more minutes running tests and discussing runtime. Don’t jump to the best/optimal solution immediately. Even if you know what the best solution is, it’s best to mention the brute force or suboptimal solutions (no matter how obvious they seem to you), and then quickly also tell them why you rejected those. That will tell the interviewer you know exactly why the solution you come up with is the best.That said, if you can’t come up with a solution you think is optimal, don’t waste all the interview discussing/thinking about it. An implemented suboptimal solution is many times better than a unimplemented optimal one.If on a board, write down the question/details as the interviewer tells you. Write down everything you think is important. Learn to ask questions that will define the problem more, for example if the input will only be integers, the ranges etc. This will give you time where you can keep talking slightly ‘mindlessly’ and you can think in advance about the solutions.Write down test cases before anything else. No need to write working code for test cases. Stuff like foo(“input”) => “expected_output” is completely fine. This will ensure you have a starting point for the logic as well as ensure that you and the interviewer are on the same page regarding the problem.Write down test cases for each corner case. I cannot emphasise how important good test cases are. Writing test cases first and dry running them before telling the interviewer you are done will automatically put you ahead of most people. Interviewers love Test-Driven-Developement.Practice talking out loud when thinking about the problem at the same time. Most people are used to being left alone and staring at the screen in silence and then comng up with a solution. That doesn’t work in an interview. Don’t be silent for more than 5-7 seconds. Even when writing code keep talking about what it does. Bonus points if you relate it to the test cases you wrote in the start, for example “This if condition handles the base case tested in that test case…”. Start running the test cases on your own when you feel you are done. Don’t wait for the interviewer to tell you to test your code. The same goes for runtime. Once you are done with the test cases, discuss the runtime (talk with the interviewer and take him through how you figure out the runtime for your solution), and then write it down in Big-O notation.If the interviewer says ANYTHING when you are writing the code or discussing test cases or possible solutions, take careful note of it. Nothing an interviewer says is useless. It is more often than not a carefully thought out comment to point out some mistake or to nudge you in the correct direction.If you are completely blank and cannot think of any solution, starting running the problem through the data structures you know and try to find if there is any which has a special property which makes the solution obvious. Most problems are actually just applying the proper data structure.Team matching

This is the good part. You have cleared the technical interviews and are deemed fit for hire by the company. Now you will be added to the pool of accepted candidates and team with open positions can review your interests/skills and contact you for a chat if they think there’s a match.

How many teams you are contacted by/can talk to depends on the office you are applying to. A bigger office means you get more choice with deciding. Sometimes you only get one shot at a team matching interview, so don’t be too picky, but don’t sign up to work with a team you absolutely have nothing in common with.

This step might be skipped if you are converting from an intern position to full time and your team specifically requested to hire you, or if you were hand picked from the industry for a specific team.

Offer

Congratulations, it is time for offer. Once a team has agreed to hire you, and you have indicated that you want to join them as well, your recruiter will discuss the offer with you. There is room for negotiations, but it depends a lot on your background and other competing offers. If you are a fresh grad with no other competing offers from a similar big company, you don’t have much room for negotiation.