What Language To Use For Coding Interviews

Access Common String Groups With String Constants

Its trivia time! Is ‘A’ > ‘a’ true or false?

Its false, because the ASCII code for A is 65, but a is 97, and 65 is not greater than 97.

Why does the answer matter? Because if you want to check if a character is part of the English alphabet, one popular way is to see if its between A and z .

Checking the ASCII code works but is clumsy and easy to mess up in coding interviews, especially if you cant remember whether lowercase or uppercase ASCII characters come first. Its much easier to use the constants defined as part of the string module.

You can see one in use in is_upper, which returns whether all characters in a string are uppercase letters:

> > > importstring> > > defis_upper:... forletterinword:... ifletternotinstring.ascii_uppercase:... returnFalse... returnTrue...> > > is_upperFalse> > > is_upperTrue

is_upper iterates over the letters in word, and checks if the letters are part of string.ascii_uppercase. If you print out string.ascii_uppercase youll see that its just a lowly string. The value is set to the literal ‘ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ’.

All string constants are just strings of frequently referenced string values. They include the following:

• string.ascii_letters

These are easier to use and, even more importantly, easier to read.

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Generate Permutations And Combinations With Itertools

Interviewers love to give real life scenarios to make coding interviews seem less intimidating, so heres a contrived example: you go to an amusement park and decide to figure out every possible pair of friends that could sit together on a roller coaster.

Unless generating these pairs is the primary purpose of the interview question, its likely that generating all the possible pairs is just a tedious step on the way towards a working algorithm. You could calculate them yourself with nested for-loops, or you could use the powerful itertools library.

itertools has multiple tools for generating iterable sequences of input data, but right now well just focus on two common functions: itertools.permutations and itertools.combinations.

itertools.permutations builds a list of all permutations, meaning its a list of every possible grouping of input values with a length matching the count parameter. The r keyword argument lets us specify how many values go in each grouping:

> > > importitertools> > > friends=> > > list)

With permutations, the order of the elements matters, so represents a different pairing than , meaning that they would both be included in the list.

itertools.combinations builds combinations. These are also the possible groupings of the input values, but now the order of the values doesnt matter. Because and represent the same pair, only one of them would be included in the output list:

> > > list)

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But How Do You Know What Theyre Going To Ask

Because Cracking the Coding Interview tells you. It features nearly 200 programming questions and solutions asked by Amazon, Google, and Facebook to name a few.

The book includes:

• Walk through for each solution
• Proven strategies to tackle algorithm questions
• Extensive coverage on Big O notation, data structures and core algorithms
• Behind the scenes look at how Google & Facebook hire developers
• Techniques to ace the soft side of interview with behavioral questions
• 70% more material than the 5th edition

And thats just the beginning.

Cracking the Coding Interview is basically two books in one.

The first 90 or so pages goes over what to expect during the interview. And how to prepare for it.

Then, there are hundreds upon hundreds of pages of coding problems, hints, and solutions.

You might be thinking, Im still not convinced. Is Cracking the Coding Interviewreally worth it?

I think so. Lets take a deeper look at what it has to offer.

Important note: The vast majority of coding problems in this book are written in Java. If you are not proficient in Java, the coding questions will not be useful.

Wrapping Up And Next Steps

Now, you should have a good idea of what the coding interview entails, as well as an idea of what you need to do next. When it comes down to it, its all about practice. Its going to require hours upon hours for you to nail down the important concepts. So, make sure you plan well and study ahead. Good luck!

There is no golden ticket to coding interviews. Its important to practice, prepare for behavioral questions, and understand how a company will evaluate you based on their own standards. Its okay if you dont land the job the first time around. Sometimes, the extra practice can actually better prepare you for the job!

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What About The Relationship Between What Language You Program In And How Good Of A Communicator Youre Perceived To Be

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery. -Charles Baudelaire

Even if language choice doesnt matter that much for overall performance , we were curious whether different language choices led to different outcomes in other interview dimensions. For instance, an extremely readable language, like Python, may lead to interview candidates who are assessed to have communicated better. On the other hand, a low-level language like C++ might lead to higher scores for technical ability. Furthermore, very readable or low-level languages might lead to correlations between these two scores . The chart below suggests that there isnt really any observable difference between how candidates technical and communication abilities are perceived, across a variety of programming languages.

Furthermore, no matter what, poor technical ability seems highly correlated with poor communication ability regardless of language, its relatively rare for candidates to perform well technically but not effectively communicate what theyre doing , largely debunking the myth of the incoherent, fast-talking, awkward engineer.3

Does It Matter What Language You Code In

Whoever does not love the language of his birth is lower than a beast and a foul smelling fish. -Jose Rizal

You might imagine that different languages lead to better interviews. For instance, maybe the readability of Python gives you a leg up in interviews. Or perhaps the fact that certain languages handle data structures in a particularly clean way makes common interview questions easier. We wanted to see whether or not there were statistically significant differences in interview performance across different interview languages.

To investigate, we grouped interviews on our platform by interview language and filtered out any languages that were used in fewer than 5 interviews . After doing this, we were able to look at interview outcome and how it varied as a function of interview language.

The results of that analysis are in the chart below. Any non-overlapping confidence intervals represent a statistically significant difference in how likely an interviewee is to pass an interview, as a function of interview language. Although we dont do a pairwise comparison for every possible pair of languages, the data below suggest that generally speaking, there arent statistically significant differences between the success rate when interviews are conducted in different languages.2

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What Is The Use Of A Static Variable In C

Following are the uses of a static variable:

• A variable which is declared as static is known as a static variable. The static variable retains its value between multiple function calls.
• Static variables are used because the scope of the static variable is available in the entire program. So, we can access a static variable anywhere in the program.
• The static variable is initially initialized to zero. If we update the value of a variable, then the updated value is assigned.
• The static variable is used as a common value which is shared by all the methods.
• The static variable is initialized only once in the memory heap to reduce the memory usage.

What Is The Structure

• The structure is a user-defined data type that allows storing multiple types of data in a single unit. It occupies the sum of the memory of all members.
• The structure members can be accessed only through structure variables.
• Structure variables accessing the same structure but the memory allocated for each variable will be different.

Syntax of structure

Let’s see a simple example.

Output:

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What Is The Difference Between Call By Value And Call By Reference In C

Following are the differences between a call by value and call by reference are:

Example of call by value:

Output:

Value of a is: 10Value of b is: 20

Example of call by reference:

Output:

How To Create High

1. Cover as many survey responses as possible.

The code should be generic enough to apply to multiple comments, but specific enough to be useful in your analysis. For example, Product is a broad code that will cover a variety of responses but its also pretty vague. What about the product? On the other hand, Product stops working after using it for 3 hours is very specific and probably wont apply to many responses. Poor product quality or short product lifespan might be a happy medium.

2. Avoid commonalities.

Having similar codes is okay as long as they serve different purposes. Customer service and Product are different enough from one another, while Customer service and Customer support may have subtle differences but should likely be combined into one code.

3. Capture the positive and the negative.

Try to create codes that contrast with each other to track both the positive and negative elements of a topic separately. For example, Useful product features and Unnecessary product features would be two different codes to capture two different themes.

4. Reduce data to a point.

Lets look at the two extremes: There are as many codes as there are responses, or each code applies to every single response. In both cases, the coding exercise is pointless you dont learn anything new about your data or your customers. To make your analysis as useful as possible, try to find a balance between having too many and too few codes.

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What Is An Auto Keyword In C

In C, every local variable of a function is known as an automatic variable. Variables which are declared inside the function block are known as a local variable. The local variables are also known as an auto variable. It is optional to use an auto keyword before the data type of a variable. If no value is stored in the local variable, then it consists of a garbage value.

How To Pass A Programming Interview

This post started as the preparation material we send to our candidates, but we decided to post it publicly. For a more detailed reference of technical interview study materials, check out this extensive guide.

Being a good programmer has a surprisingly small role in passing programming interviews. To be a productive programmer, you need to be able to solve large, sprawling problems over weeks and months. Each question in an interview, in contrast, lasts less than one hour. To do well in an interview, then, you need to be able to solve small problems quickly, under duress, while explaining your thoughts clearly. This is a different skill . On top of this, interviewers are often poorly trained and inattentive , and ask questions far removed from actual work. They bring bias, pattern matching, and a lack of standardization.

Running Triplebyte, I see this clearly. We interview engineers without looking at resumes, and fast-track them to on-sites at top tech companies. Weâve interviewed over 1000 programmers in the last nine months. We focus heavily on practical programming, and let candidates pick one of several ways to be evaluated. This means we work with many programmers without formal CS training. Many of these people do poorly on interviews. They eat large sprawling problems for breakfast, but they balk at 45-min algorithm challenges.

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Interview And Body Language Skills Black

.employers often informally turn to the terms comfort factor or fit. What this essentially means is an often subjective assessment of how comfortable they are with you, or worse, how much they like you!

As contradictory to a good selection practise this is, it is nonetheless a fact of life and one you have to live with. The good news is that there are ways of ensuring that you are the candidate they are most comfortable with. These have been labelled black belt techniques simply because most managers are yet to be trained into these skills. That leaves you with a competitive advantage!

Some More Detail In Our Downloadable Guide If Youve Made It This Far Youll Likely Be Interested In Our Free Guide: Best Practises For Analyzing Open

If you ever had to analyze customer feedback, you will know that the most difficult part is to create a perfect code frame. You need to understand the dataset, the stakeholders involved and the ideal outcomes of the analysis. You will have to iterate before settling on a solution, which

Qualtrics is one of the most well-known and powerful Customer Feedback Management platforms. But even so, it has limitations. We recently hosted a live panel where data analysts from two well-known brands shared their experiences with Qualtrics, and how they extended this platforms capabilities. Below, well share the

Customer feedback doesn’t have all the answers. But it has critical insights for strategy and prioritization. Thematic is a B2B SaaS company. We aren’t swimming in feedback. Every piece of feedback counts. Collecting and analyzing this feedback requires a different approach. We receive feedback from many places: our in-product NPS

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What Is Coding In Qualitative Research

Coding is the process of labeling and organizing your qualitative data to identify different themes and the relationships between them.

When coding customer feedback, you assign labels to words or phrases that represent important themes in each response. These labels can be words, phrases, or numbers we recommend using words or short phrases, since theyre easier to remember, skim, and organize.

Coding qualitative research to find common themes and concepts is part of thematic analysis. Thematic analysisextracts themes from text by analyzing the word and sentence structure.

What Language Should I Use For A Coding Interview

Theres no perfect language to use for a coding interview. The key is to use the one most comfortable with you, so long as it is a mainstream language. Most big companies will offer a list of the languages they prefer, so you can make a selection from there. If you are applying to entry level jobs, the most mainstream languages are appropriate, and a company will assume that you can learn more on the job.

If you want to go one step above and beyond, or you are applying for a specialized position, you may consider using a language specific to that companys technology. For example, if you are interviewing at Google, you may consider interviewing in Golang, or if you want to work at Apple, you could master Swift.

Its important to acknowledge that you will be stressed and anxious during an interview. If a certain language requires you to think too much, youre more likely to make errors. Pick one that makes you feel safe, knowledgeable, and comfortable.

Remember! Its not really about having a ton of languages under your belt its about showing that you know how to think like a computer.

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What Concepts Are Tested During The Coding Interview

The coding interview will have a strong emphasis on your understanding of data structures and algorithms. Heres what you should study.

What Is The Difference Between Getch And Getche

The getch function reads a single character from the keyboard. It doesn’t use any buffer, so entered data will not be displayed on the output screen.

The getche function reads a single character from the keyword, but data is displayed on the output screen. Press Alt+f5 to see the entered character.

Let’s see a simple example

Output:

Enter a charactervalue of ch is aEnter a character again avalue of ch is a

In the above example, the value entered through a getch function is not displayed on the screen while the value entered through a getche function is displayed on the screen.

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