How to Prepare for a Coding Interview in 8 Weeks

As of this writing, the market is tough. We’ve been hit hard with a deadly
pandemic that left thousands of people unemployed. It’s layoffs everywhere and the companies are being conservative when it comes to
hiring.

Companies are not willing to hire people with no experience or people who they’ve to train.

Your first job in tech is the toughest, you’re competing
with virtually every new college grad and anyone who completed a boot
camp. I know it can be hard to even land an interview, for someone to
give you a chance to talk and demonstrate you could be valuable
employee.

Now, the chance of you getting an interview totally depends on how your resume compares to the job description. The more relevant it is to the
skills required, the better your chances of getting an interview.

To build your resume, I’d recommend https://thetechresume.com. It’s a nice read to follow the principles when it comes to building a tech resume.

Over the past few months, I’ve been collecting resources like videos,
websites, and taking notes to prepare for coding interviews.

In that process, I made an 8 weeks study guide curated of important data
structure resources to prepare for tech interviews and honestly this
study guide was helpful to me to know what to study every day and in
following a routine for my job search.

Why 8 weeks?

If you’re serious about preparing for a tech interview then 8 weeks is the
minimum to be given to prepare thoroughly for a tech interview. I know
there are few who would cram up pools of content in a week or two. But, I
believe that is not a realistic or sensible approach.

Tech interviews can be intense and most companies expect you to solve problems or go through a data structure topic in detail.

Now, My study guide with resources will eat up the entire blog space. So,
Instead of straight-up dumping down the content all together, I racked
my brains on how to deliver the content in the most effective way
possible to ensure the habit of consistency and dedication stays intact
during the interview preparation process.

In this blog post, I would give you what to cover each week. If you’re
interested to know what resources to refer to when covering each topic then I’d recommend subscribing to the newsletter https://thedailycoding.com in which you’ll receive one email daily about the concept and the resources to practice.

If you believe you can find resources to relevant topics on your own then
here’s how you should plan to cover each topic every week.

WEEK 1 — Data Structures & Big O notation

Get a hang of what are data structures and how do we measure time
complexity. What are the drawbacks and when is it better to trade time
with space.

WEEK 2 — Arrays & String Manipulation

What are arrays? How do we access them? Practice implementing them and analyze time and space complexity. Practice problems on string manipulation. Usually, big companies who mass hire and pay relatively low ask a lot of questions on string manipulation.

WEEK 3— Hash Tables & Linked Lists

How can we link our data together and what could be the most efficient way to access the data. Hash tables are important data structures when it
comes to cutting down access time. Learn about how we can chain the dataset to access and also map them with each other for easy insertion.

WEEK 4— Stacks and Queues

Understand the principles of Stacks and Queues. How can they be implemented? What are the differences? Where should each of these be applied to? Practice problems on stacks and queues.

WEEK 5 — Recursion & Sorting

Start from the anatomy of recursion to how can it be implemented to sort
elements. Recursion is an important topic and it usually applies when
implementing a sorting algorithm. Go over the popular sorting algorithm and learn how are they traversed and sorted.

WEEK 6— Tress

If you’re interviewing for Amazon then Trees are the must-know concept.
Amazon interviewers are usually very interested to know your knowledge
and problem-solving skills in relation to Trees. Make sure to cover it
broadly and implement it on your own. By the end of the week, you should
be able to reverse a binary tree.

WEEK 7 — Graph

Graphs are another hot topic that is usually asked by high rewarding companies and FAANG. If you’re a new grad then you most likely will not receive a question on graphs but it’s nice if you know it and can practice to make yourself confident and ready to take up the challenge.

Get yourself familiar with some of the famous graph algorithms.

WEEK 8 — Patterns

The last week should be all about detecting patterns. As you solve
questions on various topics, you’ll see that some of these questions
have patterns. There are few famous patterns like sliding window,
two-pointers, cyclic sort, and many more. Try to see what coding question resembles what pattern.

Now, of course, there are many study guides out there. But, this one helped me in landing my first tech job and I hope it also helps you.

If you’re interested in where to pick up resources to learn all these then as stated above, you can subscribe to the newsletter.

I hope you fight these hard times and don’t let the market condition
dictate your self-worth. The job market right now is a hot mess and I mean it.

Let’s put our energy on things we can control and make sure we are ready when the opportunity comes our way.