Thursday, July 25, 2024

Practice Coding Tests For Interviews

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Write Down Your Mistakes

Python Coding Interview Practice – Difficulty: Hard

Grab a fresh notebook. After each question you try, look back and ask yourself, What did I get wrong about this problem at first? In other words, what did you learn? For each question, take the time to write down 1 or 2 things you learned.

After each practice session, read through your whole running list of learnings. This adds a nice layer of rigor to your practice, so you remember things to fix for next time. Youll be less likely to repeat the same mistakes and, eventually, checking for those things will become second nature.

Easily Identify Unique Job Candidates

In this line of work, unique job candidates are the ones with strong coding skills and creativity. The strength of their coding skills can be only determined by examining the code on various quality and efficiency parameters. Simulator-based assessments enable you to filter out the unique job candidates by answering the following questions:

Does the candidate know how to code? Gauge language prowess by assessing the candidates conceptual understanding of important paradigms of any specific programming language

Why coders are needed? What best can they bring to the company? Help out your tech teams and let the online coding tests automatically analyze the code quality. Discover violations in any submitted code and review quality scores for each job applicant.

Is the candidate efficient enough at coding? The online interview can help compare code quality to time spent on writing it to identify the most efficient candidates. Furthermore, get insight into the depth and width of candidates capabilities in all programming stages coding, testing, debugging, and deploying.

Is the candidate cheating? With proctoring and plagiarism control, window and tab switch monitoring, full-screen enforcement, multiple window prevention, and copy-paste disablement it becomes easy to test applicants in a controlled environment and prevent cheating in an online interview, even if they are at a remote location.

Inviting candidates to interviews is just as easy.

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 is a bubble sort algorithm implemented?
  • How is a merge sort algorithm implemented?
  • How do you count the occurrence of a given character in a string?
  • How do you print the first non-repeated character from a string?
  • How do you convert a given String into int like the atoi?
  • How do you implement a bucket sort algorithm?
  • How do you implement a counting sort algorithm?
  • How do you remove duplicates from an array in place?
  • How do you reverse an array in place in Java?
  • How are duplicates removed from an array without using any library?
  • How is a radix sort algorithm implemented?
  • How do you swap two numbers without using the third variable?
  • How do you check if two rectangles overlap with each other?
  • How do you design a vending machine?
  • How do you find the missing number in a given integer array of 1 to 100?
  • How do you find the duplicate number on a given integer array?
  • Difference between a stable and unstable sorting algorithm?
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    Try Out Mock Coding Interviews

    Coding right in front of your interviewer can be a nerve-wracking experience especially if you have never done it before – which is why getting hands-on experience is so important.

    interviewing.io is currently the best mock technical interview resource in the market. It allows you to book mock coding interviews with real Google and Facebook engineers, albeit anonymously. You could even book interviews for specific roles like Mobile, Front End, Engineering Management. Even better – if you want to have an easier transition into real world coding interview – you could view recorded interviews and see what phone interviews are like.

    Moreover, if you were to do very well on your mock interviews, you will be able to unlock the “jobs page” which allows you to book interviews directly with top companies like Uber, Lyft, Quora, Asana and more. I’ve used interviewing.io both as an interviewer and an interviewee and found the experience to be excellent.

    Read more about different mock coding interview platforms here.

    Practice For Cracking Any Coding Interview

    CodeFights

    Coding questions in this article are difficulty wise ordered. The idea of this post is to target two types of people.

  • Competitive Programming Preparation : It is recommended to finish all questions from all categories except possibly Linked List, Tree and BST. However at least 10 questions from these categories should also be covered. If you have never done competitive programming before, it is strongly recommended to see How to Begin with Competitive Programming first. If you wish to get yourself prepared with a language first, you may first begin C++ Track or Java Track
  • Interview preparation It is recommended to cover all topics. In every topic, you can start from questions according to your comfort level.
  • The practice system tells you exactly the test case where your code failed. In case you need more clarity about a question, you may use the expected output button to see output for your given input. You can also view successful submissions of others in case you are stuck. To see solutions of others, please click the All Submissions button at the bottom of the problem statement.

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    Give Yourself An Edge At Your Next Interview

    With Educative Unlimited, you can access hundreds of courses tailor-made for software developers for less than $17 a month. Stay on the cutting edge by accessing interview prep courses designed by industry leaders at top tech companies while brushing up on your technical skills through hands-on coding environments.

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    Example Tech Questions You Might Get Thrown At You

  • Why did you decide to take a particular route during your take home coding challenge?
  • Talk me through what happens when you enter a web address into a browser it loads up a web page?
  • What things should you think about when setting up a database server?
  • How does one particular role within the development team interact with another role?
  • What kind of working environment are you looking for?
  • Why did you decide to take a particular route during your take home coding challenge?

    Lots of companies will ask you to complete a take home challenge first to gauge your skills – well congrats you must have passed otherwise you wouldnt be sitting there in the interview.

    These take home challenges are great for a deep dive into the solution you wrote.

    Its always a good idea to re-read the solution you provided and think about any feedback they gave on your solution.

    If they are using Geektastics review team you will have detailed feedback and some questions about your solution or pointers to third party websites to read up on. It shows a strong aptitude to learn and react positively to feedback if you have read these and can refer to them during the interview.

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    Cracking The Coding Interview

    Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions by Gayle Laakmann McDowell is the most popular book written on the subject.

    The book goes into pretty deep detail on what to expect for an interview at top tech companies and how to prepare yourself, including tips on writing a good resume and what topics you should study. She then goes on to give lots of pointers for the best approach to answering interview questions.

    Big O notation is such an important topic that it gets a whole chapter to itself. If youre a self-taught developer with no formal Computer Science background, theres a good possibility that youve never even heard of Big O, and this alone will doom your chances in many interviews.

    In a nutshell, Big O notation can be used to describe the efficiency of an algorithm by showing how many operations must be performed relative to the size of the data set. After studying it just a little, you quickly come to see why nested for loops are usually a bad programming solution.

    The bulk of the book is dedicated to technical questions and solutions, along with some tips on how to develop strategies for solving problems that youve never encountered before.

    The author uses Java throughout the book, but it should not be difficult to translate the solutions to whichever programming language you are most familiar with.

    • Arrays and Strings

    Theres also a discussion forum where many users present their versions of solutions.

    Internalize Key Tech Interview Question Patterns

    Python Coding Interview Practice – Difficulty: Medium

    Many coding interview solutions actually involve a similar set of key patterns – and learning them will help you solve any long tail problem that is outside the set of commonly asked coding interview questions.

    AlgoMonster

    Out of the resources on the internet – AlgoMonster is an excellent platform created by Google engineers. It uses a data-driven approach to condense software engineering coding interview questions into a set of key patterns, and summarized them into a structured, easy to digest course. Imagine LeetCode, but with only the key patterns you need to know.

    Best of all, AlgoMonster is not subscription-based – pay a one-time fee and get lifetime access. Join today for a 70% discount

    Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions

    This course by Design Gurus expands upon the questions on the recommended practice questions but approaches the practicing from a questions pattern perspective, which is an approach I also agree with for learning and have personally used to get better at coding interviews. The course allows you to practice selected questions in Java, Python, C++, JavaScript and also provides sample solutions in those languages.

    Learn and understand patterns, not memorize answers! Join today for a 10% discount

    And that is all from me – for more detail on each step of the software engineer coding interview preparation process, do dive into each topic within my handbook through the sidebar or by navigating to the next page!

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    Work Examples For Interview Coding Challenges

    The triage and interview process should be as realistic as possible to achieve optimal results. Most experienced engineers wont complete a coding challenge when it fails to accurately reflect their craft. But good engineers actually enjoy good problems with a feedback loop that allows them to benchmark themselves for a skill they care about. Thats why developers and engineers are attracted to a debugging or coding challenge!

    The best way to test a candidates holistic developing capabilities is to use real-world scenarios. To sweeten the deal, our coding challenges are unique to our platform and cannot be found anywhere else, online or offline. Your candidates cant just game the system by learning how to solve interview coding questions.

    So, what do we test?

    Our real-time scenarios revolve around various roles, including:

    • Full Stack engineers

    What Is The Difference Between A Static And A Dynamic Programming Language

    Static language:

    • The coder must declare the data types of variables before they can be assigned a value.
    • The computer will check these data types when the code is compiled, and any errors must be fixed before the code can be run.

    Dynamic language:

    • Data types do not need to be declared by the coder.
    • The data types will be checked at runtime, meaning that code containing errors will attempt to run.

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    Interview Coding Questions For Practice And Master Programming

    You can not master any of the programming languages without Practice. The common thing that I see among all the expert programmers- they do Practice. Lots of Practice. Practice solving interview coding questions.

    The more you practice the better you become in programming.

    Programming is a skill best acquired by Practice and Example rather than from Books.

    Alan Turing

    For every beginner, it is easy to start reading programming books and gaining theoretical knowledge. But whats the next?

    No one has become a programmer by reading books. You should actually do the programming.

    Before going to list out interview coding questions for practice, let me tell you, these are the generic coding questions. You can use these coding questions to challenge yourself and to practice any programming language like Python, C/C++, Java, and all other generic computer languages.

    How Prepare For The Coding Interview

    The

    If its your first time interviewing for developer jobs, the coding challenge can be a rude awakening.

    I can think of few other professions that require studying and practicing specialized knowledge that isnt used day-to-day on the job in order to get the job.

    It would be a bit like a hospital requiring surgeon candidates to perform open heart surgery on a random animal to get hired.

    You may think its ridiculous, a waste of time, and not a good tool to accurately evaluate your development skillsand you may be right.

    But this is the reality of the tech industry. Theres no sense in fighting it. If you want to land a full-time developer gig at company ABC, youll need to practice all sorts of algorithms and coding challenges.

    Essentially, coding interview preparation needs to be a daily habit. Youll soon become familiar with the most common coding interview questions, and with practice, theyll get easier and your brain will become a storehouse of patterns that can be applied for various problems.

    Along the way, you may even learn to master time complexity and find yourself writing much more efficient code.

    So with that in mind, here are the top 6 resources to help you get prepared for your coding interviews.

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    Best Websites To Prepare For Data Structure Algorithms And Coding Interview Questions

    Here is my list of some of the best websites which will help you to prepare for coding interviews. They are free and contain a lot of questions and offer different kinds of experiences. There are many others but I feel these five are more than enough. If you can even solve all the problems on the first website you have a very good chance of doing well on any coding interview.

    How Would You Implement The Insertion Sort Algorithm

    • We assume the first element in the array to be sorted. The second element is stored separately in the key. This sorts the first two elements. You can then take the third element and do a comparison with the ones on the left of it. This process will go on until a point where we sort the array.

    int a =

    for {

    int n = m

    while {

    int k = a

    a = a

    a = k

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    Now Youre Ready For The Coding Interview

    These are some of the most common questions outside of data structure and algorithms that help you to do really well in your interview.

    I have also shared a lot of these questions on my blog, so if you are really interested, you can always go there and search for them.

    These common coding, data structure, and algorithm questions are the ones you need to know to successfully interview any company, big or small, for any level of programming job.

    If you are looking for a programming or software development job in 2019, you can start your preparation with this list of coding questions and if you are ready for an Interview then you can also take TripleBytes quiz and go directly to the final round of interviews with top tech companies like Coursera, Adobe, Dropbox, Grammarly, and many more.

    How Do I Pass A Coding Interview

    Google Coding Interview With A Normal Software Engineer

    You must be enthusiastic about your work⦠You should study common interview conceptsâ¦. Find out from your interviewer what you need to do at this point. There are trade-offs to be made. Find out whats working. The language should be dynamic, but mention Câ¦. The more you practice, the better you will become.

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    What Is An Online Coding Assessment

    An online coding assessment is a method used by tech recruiters and hiringmanagers to measure competency of the developer in programming. A developeris given an online assessment with coding challenges that he/she needs tosolve in a real coding environment. The performance of the developer ismeasured and is mapped with competency meter. This helps to identifyquality developers based on the skill level of the developer.

    Best Resources For Coding Interviews

    The selection of good resources is very important for success in your coding interviews. If you chose the wrong resource then more than money, you will lose the valuable time you need for preparation, hence spending some time researching for a good resource.

    If you need recommendations, the following are some of my the tried and tested resources to learn Data Structure and Algorithms in-depth for coding interviews:

    And, if you prefer books, there is no better than the Cracking The Coding Interview, by Gayle Laakmann McDowellwhich presents 189+ Programming questions and solutions. A good book to prepare for programming job interviews in a short time. Btw, I will also earn some money if you buy any of these resources mentioned here.

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