Give An Example Of A Time When You Had To Work With A Team To Solve A Problem
An interviewer might ask this question to determine your ability to work with a team and if you can add to their company culture. When answering this question, focus on the skills that would make you an asset to the company’s team and how you have used those skills to successfully complete team projects in the past.
Example answer:”In my prior role, I was a member of a team of developers working on an enterprise-class application to develop a customer relationship management system. Our team functioned by assigning each developer a different piece of code to write. After I finished writing the code assigned to me, I helped the team finish the project early by helping other developers work on their code.”
Related:Java Interview Questions for Experienced Programmers
Top 100 Coding Problems From Programming Job Interviews
Without wasting any more of your time, here is my list of 100 frequently asked coding problems from programming job interviews. In order to get most of this list, I suggest actually solving the problem.
Do it yourself, no matter whether you are stuck because thats the only way to learn. After solving a couple of problems you will gain confidence.
I also suggest you look at the solution when you are stuck or after you have solved the problem, this way you learn to compare different solutions and how to approach a problem from a different angle.
How Many Questions You Should Solve Whatever It Takes
The focus has to be on quality more than quantity. The answer to this question varies according to your experience and expertise on each topic.
If you are starting from scratch. Target 100 leetcode problems as a number and divide it well across different topics and difficulty levels.
If you have already practiced some topics you can reduce the number for that topic.
Overall I solved 200 Questions on leetcode.
There are all kinds of extremes to this answer, there are people who have solved more than 500 questions and werent lucky to clear the interview. Some people solved 300 questions and cleared interview in 22 companies. You need to find out what works for you. when you feel confident enough on one topic, you can move on to next.
Key pointers specific to leetcode-
i) Acceptance rate this indicates the question is easy.
ii) Frequency . This data is crowdsourced, sorting by frequency is a premium feature.
You May Like: Mailscoop Io
Online Coding Interview And How To Codepair Remotely
The reason why you give a coding interview to a software development candidate is to make an educated guess of how well they will do their job if they are hired. This post will tell you the best way to give an online coding interview with a remote CodePair, also know as a pair programming skills assessment interview. It will also tell you how to provide a better candidate experience by code paring remotely.
A lot of the popular methods for interviewing software developers predict their success about as well as a crystal ball. What you want to see is how your developer candidates perform under real-world conditions. At the same time, you want to make it as painless as possible for your candidates to take the test.
An online CodePair interview gives you a window onto your candidates development process. It is as close to a real environment as you will find anywhere.
An online CodePair interview is only part of a technical interview. For more info, tips, and tricks check out The ultimate guide to the technical interview.
But its important not to cut corners by using outdated methods. To help you avoid that, we have compiled a list of best practices for holding CodePair interviews remotely in an efficient way.
- The best way to interview a developer
- How to conduct a CodePair interview
- How to use DevSkiller to give an online coding interview remotely
- Fixing a piece of code
- Performing a business function
What Are Some Common Data Structures
If you dont know what data structures are or how they work, it can be really hard to break into coding. If you want to work as a programmer, or even if you just want to understand programming at a deeper level, understanding common data structures is essential. Fortunately, they arent too hard to learn.
Recommended Reading: Cfo Interview
Zalando: How To Pass The Interview
Interviewing tips for software engineers applying to Zalando. Before , I worked for Zalando for over 2 years. During that time I interviewed countless developers, from junior to tech leads, mostly in the Android space. In this post, I share what I was looking for and how to best prepare for the software engineer interviews.
Zalando is the leader company for online fashion in Europe. In 2017, the company totaled over 4 billion in revenue and grew more than 20%. They employ an agile and laid back style that focuses on team autonomy, mastery, and purpose. To sustain their rapid growth, theyre hiring plenty of engineers.
I had the pleasure not only to work for the company but also to be on the frontline of interviewers. I did hundreds of phone screens, Skype interviews, onsite interviews and also some manager/tech lead interviews.
I will describe the process how it was when I left the company, which is in May 2017. There might have been changes but I expect the structure to be quite similar.
System Design Scalability Data Handling
You can expect system design questions if you have 4+ years of experience.
- Scalability and System Design are very large topics with many topics and resources, sincethere is a lot to consider when designing a software/hardware system that can scale.Expect to spend quite a bit of time on this
- Considerations:
- Distill large data sets to single values
- Transform one data set to another
- Handling obscenely large amounts of data
Don’t Miss: Interview Questions For A Cfo
Regardless Of The Outcome Appreciate The Experience
Even if you dont make it past the coding challenge stage of the interview process, dont be too disheartened. Going through a coding challenge is a great way to hone your skills, and get feedback from professional software developers. Know that youre a better developer for having completed the challenge, and take what you learned to the next coding challenge.
Most of all, have fun, and good luck!
Week 1 Brush Up On The Basics Of Your Favorite Programming Language
Brush up on your chosen programming language. There are going to be a lot of things that youve forgotten when you have been coding for your day job even using your preferred language. Ive seen people struggling to remember things like:
- How to read/write from/to files
- How to read input from the console
- How to split strings
- Is string length a function or a property
- How to declare and use 2D arrays
- In C/C++, how to handle null-terminated strings
Once, I saw a candidate get confused and not be able to remember how to figure out if a number was positive or negative. .
The time and mental energy that you spend on trying to recall the nuances of your chosen programming language would be much better spent on actually solving the problem and exhibiting your problem-solving skills. Thats what interviewers want to see.
Some companies, like Lyft and Salesforce, require you to solve problems on a laptop. You are expected to write complete programs that pass given test cases. In these cases, you might have to:
- Process command line arguments
- Parse CSV or text files
Of course, you could just Google those, but that would be time spent on trivial tasks that are necessary but dont help you stand out.
Recommended Reading: System Design Interview Prep
Coding Interview Bootcamp Course
This coding Bootcamp course will help you learn about the most common interview questions that are often asked in a coding interview. With this course, you will not only get dozens of coding questions to practice, but it will also help you understand the tips and tricks behind solving those questions so that you can perform those tricks in a real interview. The course is designed by Stephen Grider, who is an expert in developing complex JavaScript front-ends for top corporations. He will assist you throughout the course to help you defeat those interviewers who ask nasty algorithm questions. Completing this course will help you clear the coding interview and get your dream job.
Key USPs
Get a clear, well-diagramed explanation of every single problem so that you can understand how to solve it easily
Get access to a massive collection of common algorithm questions, including everything from reversing a string to determining the width of a BST.
Learn how to tackle common data structures used in web development, software development project
Get access to dozens of coding questions that are commonly asked during interviews with their accurate solutions and tricks
You can
Review: I really liked the course, which could have been excellent if we could have added some real-world interview questions regarding the tough algorithms. But overall, I loved the course. Thanks. Faraz Habeebuddin
Eat The Elephant One Bite At A Time
The topic of computer science is, by its very own nature, very dense, and the subject matter can be hard to digest. Pick a particular area, increasing the difficulty as you go, and try to solve 23 coding questions per day. Anymore than this, and you may start to lose your drive to study, begin skipping days, etc., and a good study plan will immediately unravel.
Dedicate one day to reviewing that weeks questions and study topics. This is extremely important for material retention. Take one day off per week to give your brain a break. This is important, everyone needs to rest and reset.
Lets say you devote 6 weeks to interview preparation. At 6 days per week, with 1 day dedicated to review , youre going to solve 60 questions , or 90 questions . Thats pretty serious progress, and 6 weeks will go by in a blur! Again, dial the time up or down as needed.
Dont cram, unless absolutely necessary! Re-read the section on properly preparing if needed. A crash course will yield marginal results at best, failure at worst.
Also Check: Questions To Ask A Cfo In An Interview
Tools Best Practices And Technologies Questions
This is a broad category. As a software engineer, you need to keep up-to-date with the industry best practices, know your tools and be constantly learning. Common questions in this domain involve knowledge of methodologies such as TDD, libraries such as Retrofit and blog resources such as Medium or HackerNews. The key element here is not to know any specific tool but rather to show motivation, commitment and desire to learn more.
Repairing A Broken System For Hiring Developers
With a growing digital and global marketplace, the quantity of potential software engineers has explodedbut alas, how do you find the good ones? Tech hiring teams are discovering that their old programming interview processes are irrevocably broken theyre no longer generating the kinds of software engineers they truly need. The truth is many tech professionals dont know how to interview software developers.
With most software engineering interviews, the primary goal is to set up a realistic scenario that challenges the individuals skills. Identifying their weak points provides everyone with the opportunity to improve. This calls for a detailed analysis of the mistakes that can occur during the software engineering interview.
Also Check: Questions To Ask A Cfo During An Interview
Clean Up When You’re Done
Walk through your solution by hand, out loud, with an example input. Actually write down what values the variables hold as the program is runningyou don’t win any brownie points for doing it in your head. This’ll help you find bugs and clear up confusion your interviewer might have about what you’re doing.
Look for off-by-one errors. Should your for loop use a “< =” instead of a “< “?
Test edge cases. These might include empty sets, single-item sets, or negative numbers. Bonus: mention unit tests!
Don’t be boring. Some interviewers won’t care about these cleanup steps. If you’re unsure, say something like, “Then I’d usually check the code against some edge casesshould we do that next?”
Algorithms And Data Structures Questions
Algorithmic questions are easier than the big 4. Usually, at least one interview will deal with coding, with an emphasis on algorithms. Other interviews may have easier coding questions on the line of reverse a string. More advanced topics such as graphs and dynamic programming are not so common.
For example, I used to ask flood fill, a graph question. The problem was taken directly from Cracking the Code Interview and can be resolved in few lines of code either by recursion or with a queue . I thought that taking a problem from a standard source would make it easier to answer. I was wrong: only one person in a dozen answered satisfactorily and I had to take the question out.
To prepare I recommend Tech Interview Pro by ex-Google, ex-Facebook Senior Staff Software Engineer Patrick Shyu . Use this links to get 40% off and support the blog. And for more popular coding interview problems, check out CoderPro. Use this link to get 20% off.
Don’t Miss: Women’s Outfit For Job Interview
Meaningful Questions To Ask The Interviewer
Interviews are a two-way street. You should be learning about them just as much as theyre learning about you!
Asking thoughtful questions is also a good way to stand out in the interview. The age-old adage people dont remember what you say, but they remember how you made them feel is so true when it comes to interviews, says Refael . When a candidate keeps the flow going in a friendly conversation, instead of making me feel like I am conducting an interrogation, I will remember our brief time together fondly.
Of course, you should tailor your questions to the specific situation, but here are a few meaningful questions you can ask:
- What do you like most about working here?
- What frameworks, tools, tech stack, etc. does your company use?
- Can you describe the development process here?
- How do you test your code?
- Does the company offer opportunities for professional development, training for engineers, etc.?
- Whats the most challenging project youve worked on here?
The other upside: while youre listening to their answer, you get a little break from talking!
Importance Of Whiteboard Coding
For any technical interviewer, it is imperative to use a whiteboard while you are working through the problem. Working through examples on the board by hand gives you and the interviewer visuals and a better understanding of how youre solving the problem. Not only does this give you another approach to solving the problem but the interviewer, who is essentially testing what it would be like to work with you, can now clearly see how you express your understanding, thoughts, and approach.
When it is time for coding the solution up, youll want to be able to reference any sketches or problems you solved as well as writing up a clean code. The code you write is going to be a clear indication of your software engineering skills.
- Do you break up long and confusing functions into smaller helper functions?
- Do you try to solve the bigger picture and link up all the parts or do you get distracted by less important aspects of the task at hand?
- Do you get caught up in very specific and unimportant pieces of information?
- Is the code reusable? Is it adaptable? How versatile is it? What happens when the problem is changed a little or becomes generic can you easily edit the code?
- Do you think through the clear use cases and environment of the code and how you want to structure it?
Also Check: Interview Attire Womens
Brainstorm Different Data Structures And Algorithms
Sometimes the easiest way to approach a coding interview question is to take different common solutions and see if any of them apply. We can do exactly this in coding interviews by brainstorming different data structures and algorithms and seeing if any of them are a good fit for our problem.
Lets say that we have a problem that involves strings. For example, maybe we want to all the strings in an array that have a certain prefix. Lets brainstorm:
- Just keep the strings in the array. We iterate through the array and just check the prefix of each string.
- Add all the strings to a hashmap with mappings for each possible prefix. That might work but there are a lot of possibilities.
- We could sort the array of strings. That might make things easier.
- Maybe we could do some sort of tree structure?
- Speaking of trees, what if we used a trie?
From this basic brainstorm, weve come up with multiple valid possibilities. In this case, the problem that were looking at does have many possible solutions, so thats to be expected. Even if we only had one way to solve the problem, though, this may help elucidate ways in which we can approach it.
The key is that no idea is too dumb when youre brainstorming. Youre doing this in front of your interviewer, so the temptation is to try and sound smart, but you can very easily shoot yourself in the foot by doing this. If you filter yourself while brainstorming, you may miss key insights.
