The software working professional and students should plan and prepare for the coding interview. The Work–life balance is a concept including proper prioritizing between work and lifestyle. The working professional should manage the time between the work, interview preparation and family. The student may get more time for preparing the programming interview. The students can start to prepare interview during middle of education. Plan If the candidate is missing any skill, they should plan and prepare before attending interview. The software companies can be categorized as product based company, service based company, and web-based company. The candidate must understand the job description and responsibilities from company’s career page or job portal. The candidate must take time for interview preparation. The candidate can keep following the current trends from different web portals and job requirements. All the software companies are looking for the skilled candidate who adopts the company culture and good in technical skills. If the working professional feels comfort zone or not learning any new skill, they can start to prepare the programming interview. Time management The candidate should manage the time properly while preparing and attending the coding interview. The candidate needs to prepare computer fundamental, data structure and algorithm, object oriented programming, database and other technical areas. If the candidate start searches from the internet, the links are linked with a lot of links and finally the candidate may not be able to get the information clearly. The candidate should plan the list of weak and strong areas and make a do-to list for each task. The candidate should identify what are the new skills required for his profile. If the candidate does not have any skill set, they can identify and get training from the institution or develop from good books and practice. The candidate should select at least one programming language. Computer Theory The candidate should prepare for the following computer science theory. Theoretical computer science focuses on abstract or mathematical aspects of computing and includes the theory of computation. Distributed computation Computational complexity theory Parallel computation Data structure and algorithm Cryptography Coding theory The candidate should also prepare about the general operating system, network computing and relational database management system. Programming language The candidate must practice using at least one programming language. The candidate chooses the programming language based on the candidate preference. Most of the e-commerce or product development software companies do not strict with the programming language. The candidate free to choose the programming language from C, C++, java, Javascript or Python. If the candidate knows the more than one programming language, they must choose one programming language and prepare the data structure and algorithm questions. The candidate should not confuse to choose the programming language during coding interview. Data structure and algorithm The candidate must prepare at least the following data structure and algorithm topics. Data structure list Array Stack Queue LinkedList Priority Queue Graph Heap AVL Tree Red-Black Tree Algorithms Binary Search Binary Search Tree Bubble Sort Quick Sort in-place Insertion Sort Heap Sort Bucket Sort Radix Sort Depth-First Search Breadth-First Search Dijkstras algorithm Floyd-Warshall Traveling Salesman The candidate can solve the problem using one of the following algorithmic techniques: Divide-and-conquer Dynamic programming Greediness Recursion The candidate can get the full list from page. http://careerdrill.com/AlgorithmList.php Practice problems The candidate can prepare the programming interview questions using the following options. Prepare using curriculum books Prepare using industry leading books Learn and practice the existing interview questions Online forums Online articles Interview experience Most of the companies ask the candidate to sign the non-disclosure agreement before the interview. The candidate may not be able to explain or tell the full interview questions in blogs or forums. But, product development companies are looking for data structure, algorithm, and relational database management system (RDBMS) and object-oriented programming concepts. The candidate can start to prepare from good books. Once they good at understanding the concepts, the candidate can start practice in Integrated development environment (IDE). But, the programming interview expects the candidate write code on whiteboard or paper. So, the candidate should prepare with the actual medium. The candidate can follow the below order. Originally published at careerdrill.com on April 26, 2016.
