Top Mistakes candidates make during the Coding Interviews
- Failing to understand and disambiguate the problem statement, very very clearly. If you start solving the wrong problem, it’s a death spiral.
- Not using proper naming convention? It’s ok for example to use ‘i’ in for loops but using ‘sortedSet’ for a sorted set makes everyone’s job easy. Your brain will save a few cycles in mapping ss to sortedSet and that will reduce stress. As one engineer put it, “almost costed me my interview..”!
Pro-Tip: The interviewer is also taking notes, so he/she may not be 100% focussed on the code. If the interviewer tunes out for 30 seconds and comes back to three new variables, i,j,k, it will not make things any easier. - Missing Scale considerations. Design for finding duplicate links from a list of 100 url’s is going to be completely different ballgame from designing it for 100M url’s. Think, in memory sort!
- Ignoring small but important optimizations. Keep your eyes & mind open to see how you can continue to optimize for more efficient pieces of code as you solve!
- Not doing a walk thru of your code at the end – Make sure to spot check for some obvious flaws!
Taking a mock interview builds the muscle memory you need to continue improving these skills! Set one up today!