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Especially for computer science roles that require “hard”,technical skills, employers don’t want to waste their time and energy on candidates who can’t meet their basic skills expectations. The following tests and interviews will be crucial in proving your abilities.
Technical interviews are meant to test your coding abilities and they can occur over the phone, over video calls, or even in person. Depending on the nature and size of the company, the interviewer typically is a member of the engineering and technology departments, with their title being a senior software engineer or possibly even the CTO.
Here are some FAQs about technical interviews as well as some tips on how to ace them.
depth or breadth?
When it comes to learning languages, specialize. Choose a language like C++, Java, Ruby Python, Go, or C. When solving the company’s problem sets, they typically let you choose the language so rather than learning a little bit of each, be confident in 1 or 2. For example, if you are interested in front-end web development – javascript is the way to go.
practice problems and concepts?
Some topics are more likely to come up than others. Some must-study topics include data structures, big O notation, trees, sorting and search algorithms, heaps, arrays, hash tables, and dynamic programming. Besides brushing up on the fundamentals, also look into what your job potentially could focus in on and practice more of those problems. Some great resources for practice can be found on binarysearch, leetcode, and hackerrank.
When you are working on those coding practice problems, you should also spend some time analyzing how to optimize the code in both runtime and memory space.
time crunch?
Depending on how comfortable you are with solving problems, time may or may not be an issue. However, perfect code isn’t the only goal of your interview. The interviewer also wants to see your problem solving, thought process, and decision making. They may ask you to walk them through your logic and think deeper about the application and occurrence of some questions. Likewise, some of the most avoidable mistakes come from rushing and not taking time to ask more clarifying questions, so don’t be afraid to discuss a little bit with the interviewer about the problem before diving in.
