Practice Ideas

Because we believe that practice is so important to being successful at the algorithmic interviews, we have added some more ideas about how to practice in this last section.

We should reiterate that practicing for the interviews should reflect the actual format of your upcoming interviews as closely as possible. It is often a specific time-bound format that is not like the usual work experience. In most work enviroments that we are aware of one has time to think well about a solution, to try a few iterations of the code if needed, to discuss with colleagues if needed and this may well take a few hours or even days in some cases. At regular tech interviews this is not the case.

The most popular preparation approach would be, as we have mentioned already, to practice using websites like LeetCode and to bound yourself to specific timeframes. It is normal to not be able to solve tasks as quickly as you need but hopefully with time this will get better. For many people a few months of preparation is something normal. Unless you are already quite comfortable with solving algorithmic problems, you should not expect to become a master within 1-2 weeks.

Finally, here is a blog post we wrote about the specific format of tech interviews and our opinion on that.