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I am a recent college grad and I started interviewing pretty late. I never did an internship while in school and have had a grand total of four phone interviews to date and two onsites(Google), resulting in one job offer(with a decent tech company). I think tech interviews are beatable. Here's my hypothesis/strategy: --> The "problem solving" part favors people with an aptitude for math but I think that this is a skill that can be acquired. I presume that you have an understanding of all the basics including graphs and Dynamic Programming. Doing mass interviews/concentrated studying might not help here. I would recommend a style to you: Start with a problem and solve it in 45 minutes. Then look for a similar problem(within similar domain) and try to solve it 40 minutes. Then push yourself until you reach about 20 minutes. Shift to another domain and repeat the process over and over again. The idea here is to practice for interview just like you would do for a math exam. You should never trip on the basics e.g code syntax, or understanding what data structure to use etc. Also problems belong to certain domains and this strategy of repetitive training develops the intuition to categorize a problem. Finally, 1.5 months might not be enough. I would recommend about 3 months of studying as you understand things better over a long period of time --this is why cramming never works. All the best



This is an interesting strategy. I like it. Also, given all the posts in this thread, I'm beginning to think it's going to take over a year to really get a good understanding of this stuff.


One year is way too much. Tbh, you need two semesters of coding to beat tech interviews. An intro to programming class and data structure class(Which I think you have).

The only advantage taking more classes is that you develop "Comp Sci street cred" but I believe it has no correlation to success in interviews. The advantage of experience is that you get to master a certain language well. Other than that it just comes to a matter of how you practice.

For "culture fit"(which generally means don't be an asshole), communication and butterflies, I think https://www.pramp.com/ will go a long way in helping.


Also I think CLRS is an overkill. Try The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skiena




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