Week 14: Getting ready for an interview
It felt great to have some calm after two complicated months, we spent a lot of time researching, studying, coding, between one and another meeting, we were preparing for the big step (working with a client), but before that, we need to do one more thing, pass an interview.
The process of recruiting people was something that I have always be aware of, you have the first interview to see how you are, what are your thoughts about the job, some technologies, and so on. After that you have another interview, this time you will solve some problems, maybe some code and more stack related questions, or at least that is what I thought, to be honest, I have never seen an interview from another perspective, in this case, from the recruiters perspective, for me it was a simple process.
The process
It may sound weird, but everywhere you go for an interview, the process is basically the same, you will receive algorithm and coding problems, and the reason for this is simple, they want to know how good you are solving problems if your analytical skills are efficient, and obviously your coding skills. Sometimes these problems are harder than expected, and recruiters don’t expect you to complete them on time, usually, you have around 45 minutes to solve one problem, and you’ll come up with some questions, it may take you a while to try to explain what you are actually doing and more, so don’t feel bothered if you don’t finish on time
One of the other things that recruiters are very interested too are your social skills. During the interview, the recruiter will ask you different questions, some technical, just to see how passionate you are about the field, or about some old problems you had on previous projects, and it’s very important to be open and tell them the most you can about it, they want to know by your own words how you act, what are your strengths, weaknesses, even your values. For many companies is very important to get people that could fit in their work environment.
This may only be a small part of the process, but it actually helped me to understand what companies are really looking for, how they conceived an interview, and what they expect me to do so I could get in.
Coding skills
Throw the last months I have been coding a lot, but mostly, for problems related to established projects, and it was very helpful, it helped me to understand different functional codes, from tools that I use every day. Although, as I explained before, the problems in interviews are based on algorithms, and it’s something that every software engineer should know. Data structures are the base of basically every program, and if you understand them everything feels easier, so, it was very clear that the next step should be to practice them.
Hackerrank has been a great tool, it shows you different problems that could be perfect for an interview. Let’s say that you want to improve you array knowledge, well, there’s a whole section of array related problem, from the most basic to the hardest ones so you could practice, and if for some reason you didn’t get to a solution, there is a comment section, where the community tries to explain their different solutions, and how did they get to that answer.
On the other hand, what I have been enjoying most, are the problems from Project Euler. Since I was a kid, math has always been one of my favorite classes. There’s something that intrigues me from math problems, it could be the satisfaction when you solve a problem or even the challenge of solving it. What Project Euler does, gives you math-related problems that need to be solved with different algorithms, I think it’s a great way to improve either analytical and coding skills, you are not limited, you don’t have to use an array or a list if you don’t want to, sometime you will need them and some others don't, you could apply recursive programming to solve problems faster, everything is up to you, and that’s what makes Project Euler very special, there isn’t a guideline, you can solve them as you think of ’em, there are no regulations, just your imagination.