Thank you, Sam, for sharing these invaluable tips for tech interviews! I appreciate your dedication to providing valuable content. I understand you have a busy schedule, but would it be possible to arrange a mock interview session with you? Your expertise would undoubtedly be instrumental in refining my interview skills. Looking forward to hearing from you! Keep up the fantastic work! :)
Hi Deep, thank you for the kind message and sure! I list my services at www.tetralark.com/schedule and if it makes sense for you then there's a form to contact me there.
This advice is great, I would add one tip.If you are in a very fast interview (ex. 20 min/question for mediums/hards) don't spend too much time at the start of your interview providing an explanation as you will be very time crunched.
Thanks Hersh and woah! Yes agreed, if one only has ~20 min to solve medium or hard questions then there isn't really much time to do anything besides identify and write a solution, I've never had or given interviews like that, what a tough experience that sounds like!
When solving Leetcode problems, do you read if ever other people’s solutions? I mean would you recommend to avoid reading solution and keep on fighting on one’s own till the end? I hope my question is clear, though English is not my native language.
Hey that's a great question, I'll make a short answering this but here it is too: The answer isn't very satisfying, I think it depends! 1 - If you're staring at a problem for ~10min and you haven't the faintest idea of what the solution might be, then yes, look up the solution, it's not productive trying to recreate centuries of research to figure out say quicksort (unless you're excited by algorithms and are doing it for the love of it, then absolutely yes!). So if you don't know the existence of the algorithm at all, then yes look it up! 2 - However, if after ~10min you kinda know that say you'll need to use a hash map to track entries in an array, but you're not sure how to write it yet, then here I think it would hurt yourself to look up the answer instead of spending < 30 min to an hour trying to solve this, because then you'd lose out on that experience gain. So, when you feel like you could write a solution (even if just brute force ish), then it's worth writing the solution first because it'll make your pattern-matching skills, connecting the dots, etc. skill grow and the next time you see a problem like that you'll know you can already do the brute, and can start trying to apply more optimized solutions. After you've solved a problem, it's great to go over a couple of the solutions / discussions. However often the discussions have people saying VERY wrong solutions or ideas, so keep a critical eye.
thank you for this
You're very welcome!
Thank you, Sam, for sharing these invaluable tips for tech interviews! I appreciate your dedication to providing valuable content. I understand you have a busy schedule, but would it be possible to arrange a mock interview session with you? Your expertise would undoubtedly be instrumental in refining my interview skills. Looking forward to hearing from you! Keep up the fantastic work! :)
Hi Deep, thank you for the kind message and sure! I list my services at www.tetralark.com/schedule and if it makes sense for you then there's a form to contact me there.
This advice is great, I would add one tip.If you are in a very fast interview (ex. 20 min/question for mediums/hards) don't spend too much time at the start of your interview providing an explanation as you will be very time crunched.
Thanks Hersh and woah! Yes agreed, if one only has ~20 min to solve medium or hard questions then there isn't really much time to do anything besides identify and write a solution, I've never had or given interviews like that, what a tough experience that sounds like!
When solving Leetcode problems, do you read if ever other people’s solutions? I mean would you recommend to avoid reading solution and keep on fighting on one’s own till the end? I hope my question is clear, though English is not my native language.
Hey that's a great question, I'll make a short answering this but here it is too: The answer isn't very satisfying, I think it depends!
1 - If you're staring at a problem for ~10min and you haven't the faintest idea of what the solution might be, then yes, look up the solution, it's not productive trying to recreate centuries of research to figure out say quicksort (unless you're excited by algorithms and are doing it for the love of it, then absolutely yes!). So if you don't know the existence of the algorithm at all, then yes look it up!
2 - However, if after ~10min you kinda know that say you'll need to use a hash map to track entries in an array, but you're not sure how to write it yet, then here I think it would hurt yourself to look up the answer instead of spending < 30 min to an hour trying to solve this, because then you'd lose out on that experience gain.
So, when you feel like you could write a solution (even if just brute force ish), then it's worth writing the solution first because it'll make your pattern-matching skills, connecting the dots, etc. skill grow and the next time you see a problem like that you'll know you can already do the brute, and can start trying to apply more optimized solutions.
After you've solved a problem, it's great to go over a couple of the solutions / discussions. However often the discussions have people saying VERY wrong solutions or ideas, so keep a critical eye.
@@samobot Thank you very much for such an detailed answer.