How To Crack Coding Interview In One Attempt

By
Aditi Singh
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Interviews are the first step to getting qualified for your dream job. It sometimes can be difficult and anxiety-creating for even experienced candidates. For programmers, coding interviews are considered one of the most challenging rounds to crack as it assesses a candidate’s skills, logical thinking, intelligence, and ability to solve problems and decisions. Before attending any coding interview, one must prepare well for their interviews in advance. Cracking the coding interview is not easy as it involves working with algorithms, problems, and complex situations that require strong technical and logical skills to crack but with the right knowledge and path, one can easily get their dream jobs.

Here Are The Steps To Clear Any Coding Interview

Step 1: Practice on paper

Practice is the key to success. Practicing on paper helps to train your mind to recognize algorithmic patterns and also gives you the confidence to solve the surprise problems that the interviewee might ask you randomly.

Learning to code with autocomplete assistance offers much help such as syntax highlighting, code completion, and quick debugging. So, prepare these for these interviews with a plain text editor, a piece of paper, or a whiteboard.

Step 2: Collecting the best resource for learning 

Anything is possible with the correct amount of reading and information. Getting the right knowledge will surely help you to crack these tough exams.

Here is the list of top five books that can be a great resource to crack the coding interview–

  • Programming Interviews Exposed by John Mongan, Noah Suojanen Kindler, Eric Giguère
  • Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
  • The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S Skiena
  • Elements of Programming Interviews by Amit Prakash, Tsung-Hsien Lee, Adnan Aziz
  • Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley

Here is the list of free online courses to crack coding interviews –

  • Ace Coding Interviews

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  • Coding Interview Questions and Answers

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  • Common Coding Interview Problems

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  • Solving Coding Interview Problems from Top MNCs

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Step 3: Do Mock Interviews

Practice as many interview questions and answers as possible from various resources and start giving mock interviews. This can help you to learn a lot by experiencing the real mistakes which may happen during mock interviews.

Some of the free mock interview sites are-

Step 4: Write down your mistakes

After each mock interviews or practice sessions try to analyze your mistakes and learn from them. This way eventually you’ll start remembering your mistakes and correcting them the next time

Step 5: Work on Software Design Skills

It is very important as a fresher to understand software design and the development process as it would make you stand out from the group of other competitors.

Step 6: Listen to every detail

Coding interviews are very interactive so practice your attentive listening. Active listening reveals your intelligence and wisdom in the interview. When you listen to a problem, you need to pay attention to all of the details so that you are not off to the races solving the wrong problem. You can even ask for clarifications.

Step 7: Company-specific preparation

Spending some time researching the company. It helps a lot to prepare for your conversation with interviewers. This boosts your confidence since you know the latest interview format and the kind of questions being asked by the company.

Step 8: Speak your thoughts

While solving a coding problem, it is always better to speak out about your approach so that the interviewer knows about your thinking process. Candidates should engage the interviewer in a meaningful conversation while solving the problem.

Step 9: Write Clean Code

In the interview write the code in such a way that it is easy to read and understand. To master the coding interview questions one must know the algorithm well.

Step 10: Test Your Code

Here are a few ways to test your coding skills and code-

  • Read the code line-by-line, explaining what each line of code does to the interviewer.
  • Scrutinize the code that looks odd to you.
  • Check spots prone to error.
  • Test with a small test case and also null or extreme cases.