1. How to Prepare for a Coding Interview
“Before anything else, getting ready is the secret of success.”
Henry Ford
Engineering Career Center (ECC)
Arizona State University

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3. Interview Lifecycle - What to expect?
Networking to Identify Companies, Contacts
Résumé and Application
Preparing a sound résumé, updating LinkedIn profile and requesting recommendations
Applying on company websites/job portals
We will briefly discuss what does an interview lifecycle looks like for computing majors and what you should do at every step.
Browse for the companies you are interested to work for and who are actively hiring (you can start by looking at the company profiles and job listings on Sun Devil CareerLink). Identify networking opportunities like Info Sessions (Sun Devil CareerLink), Student Org Meetings, Career Fairs, Conferences, Hackathons where you can meet the people who work at those companies and can refer you for a relevant job opportunity. Try to collect as many s/other contact information by striking genuine conversations with such people (and not out rightly asking for a job!).
Prepare tailored résumés for specific jobs by highlighting the key words on the job descriptions. Make an appointment with the Engineering Career Center and have your résumé reviewed by a peer coach.
Update your LinkedIn profile with all your work experience, GitHub profile, portfolio and projects. Complete every section of the LinkedIn profile and reach out to your professors, advisors, colleagues, etc. for recommendations.
Submit your résumé via personal s, job portals and career fairs.

4. Interview Lifecycle - What to expect?
Preparing for the Interview
Taking the Phone Screening Interviews
Going for On-site Interviews
Receiving Offer & Starting Negotiation
Start preparing for interviews, technical as well behavioral. Do not wait for an interview to prepare for the technical part, schedule some hours for interview prep every week. Attend career sessions throughout the ASU campus to prepare for behavioral interviews. Optimal Résumé is an excellent tool to approach behavioral questions.
Mock interview with friends on whiteboard, pen and paper or shared documents. This will make you feel less stressed on the D-day and will sharpen your skills.
Reserve a quiet place for your phone/video interview and make sure that you have access to a computer with internet. Follow the interview prep documentation from the recruiter and get familiar with interviewer’s tools used for coding (Google doc, codepad.io, other online coding sites.).
Eat enough (but not overeat) before you take the interview and keep water accessible.
Follow up with a thank you to the interviewer.
Arrange with the recruiter for on-site interview logistics.
Dress up formally (or business casual but nothing less) for the interview. Do well on your different interviews with engineers, HR, hiring managers. Do not forget to ask questions!
Once you receive an offer, research the market salaries and negotiate. Negotiation is usually for students looking for a full time position or in cases where it’s their 2nd or 3rd internship
This presentation will deal with technical coding interview prep for the phone screen and on-site interviews.

5. Coding Interview – How to prepare?
Go back to fundamentals. Read this blog
Participate in coding competitions/ hackathons
Both phone and on-site coding interviews test your algorithm, data structures and design skills. Their aim is to evaluate your computer science fundamentals and gauge if you can spot their use in an unfamiliar problem.
Blog link:
Brush up your sophomore and junior years’ concepts on data structures, algorithms, time and space complexities, operating systems.
Implement sorting algorithms, hash tables, binary search tress and traversal, etc.
Master one programming language and understand its basic tenets. Most of the times you are given the choice to choose the interview language from those listed on your resume(in the order of proficiency of high to low). Make sure do not list languages you have no idea of.
Attend hackathons and participate in coding competitions, that will not only boost your résumé and provide ample networking opportunities but also train you for time-constrained coding. ASU student orgs hold at least two to three hackathons and coding competitions every year and there are plenty that take place all over the United States. You can get travel funding from USG and GPSA. Subscribe to student orgs newsletter to stay updated about hackathon dates.

6. Coding Interview – How to prepare?
Buy technical interview prep books
Cracking the Coding Interview by G L McDowell
Official Cracking the Coding Facebook Group
Elements of Programming Interviews by A Aziz & T-H Lee
Write, write and write more! Resist the urge to type the code
Buy books like Cracking the Coding Interview (invest in a hard copy, it will be a great payoff once you crack that dreaded interview).
Use pen and paper, whiteboards(very highly recommended). Physically writing your solution keeps you from jumping into code from the start. It gives you time to think about the problem and judge possible solutions. Starting right away with code is a trial and error method, and you don’t want to leave that impression about you.
Once you are sure of your solution, you can type your solutions on online coding sites.

7. Coding Interview – How to prepare?
Practice online
Practice with problems on online websites. At least complete the easy and the medium problems. Check their discussion boards for two to three solutions with different space and time complexities for each problem.
There are tons of other websites and if you have a different preference you can practice as you like. But try to remain focused on a few.

8. Coding Interview – What happens?
Typical Duration – 45 to 60 minutes each
Introduction and Résumé Questions – 5 minutes
One or Two Coding Questions – 30 to 40 minutes
You have prepared to conquer the coding interview. What happens next?
Each technical interview is an opportunity for you to engage in a bi-directional conversation. It is important that you ask questions and allow the interviewer to talk while you are solving the problem.

9. Coding Interview – What you do?
Approaching the Problem
Clarify the question
Work on a small example
Spell out the brute-force solution
Think out loud
Apply patterns and common data structures
Do not jump to solving the problem as soon as you see it. Make no assumptions. Based on your first understanding discuss an example with the interviewer and clarify any doubts, even though it may sound trivial to you. Based on this discussion, write down some unit test cases. Your ability to identify edge cases, underflow, overflow will make you stand out from other candidates.
For example, you have to write the function atoi in C++. You should point out the edge cases where the output integer could be negative, the input string can have extra spaces.
Write small examples to test your solution. Try to solve the examples before you think of a solution.
Make brute-force your first approach for every coding interview. This will give you a confident start when you will build complex solutions over the brute force approach and show that you care about optimized solutions.
Open your minds to the interviewer by thinking out loud through the problem solving process. This makes it easy for the interviewer to contribute and give you hints to the right solution. Also saying out your solution is good for coherent thinking and demonstrates your intellectual prowess.
Think in terms of basic data structures and problem solving techniques like merge-sort, dynamic programming, divide and conquer, etc.

10. Coding Interview – What you do?
Presenting the Solution
Libraries
Focus on the top level algorithm
Manage the whiteboard
Test for corner cases
Syntax
Memory Management
Become expert of data structure libraries and use correct function calls. HashMap has <key,value> pair structure, do not mess that up.
Think high level algorithm first where you can assume functions for basic/trivial tasks.
Start from the top left corner on the whiteboard and abbreviate long terms. Leave 1-2 line spaces for future updates when writing on a whiteboard.
Avoid making frequent syntax errors, scan your code for syntax issues.
Avoid memory management unless the interviewer asks you too. Your first solution need not be optimized for time and space complexities, you will develop that over the time.

11. Coding Interview: Conversation..
Interview refers to a one-to-one conversation
Do not think of the solution in your mind
Ask a friend to practice interviews
This video is a great demonstration of an actual coding interview
A bi-directional conversation is very important for the coding interview.
The interviewer is not interested in the final answer, he/she wants to judge your process of solving a problem. Do not present pseudo code as your final solution, your answer should have readable code that can be compiled.
We have heard so many times that people didn’t get to the next round even though they found the correct solutions. Maybe they didn’t give enough opportunity for the interviewer to test their problem solving, or simply didn’t engage in a conversation. You can watch this video ( to see what an actual good interview looks like.

12. Coding Interview: Common Issues
I was interrupted during my interview
Ensure that you are taking the interview in a quiet place and use good quality listening devices to cancel any noise. Put your cell phone to sleep.
Human or technical interruption can happen during your interview. This is a great opportunity for you to show how you will adapt when such situations arise at your job. Stay calm.
After the interruption, paraphrase what you were saying/doing earlier to help the interviewer get back on the same page as you.

13. Coding Interview: Common Issues
Ten minutes into the problem and I realize I am on the wrong path.
Discuss the problem with the interviewer before jumping into the solution to prevent that from happening.
If it happens, take a few seconds to reconfirm that you are are really wrong. Share this with the interviewer and explain clearly what is wrong and how you would correct it.

14. References The presentation is not an original piece of work
Following books have been referred to extensively to develop the slides:
Cracking the Coding Interview by G L McDowell
Elements of Programming Interviews by A Aziz & T-H Lee