Key Cs Interview Steps

January 16, 2020 | 2 Minute Read

So you want to get into software engineering…

Few things to get you better prepared–

Learn about the process and what you need to do to shine through the process. Knowing the track makes a difference, just search or read proples’s stories on Glassdoor/careercup. Where would you like to play in a track you do best or you know very well?
Polishing resume, 1 page is better, spend few $ on LinkedIn to get a professional review your resume. Your friends and seniors have an idea but they are not an expert on resume writing.
Large companies might ban you for a period if you fail onsite say 6 months or a year. So save the big ones until you are fully prepared and taken several onsites.
Even if you are banned, there might recruiters willing to interview, so keep applying.
Make you linked-in profile keyword ready so that you are a top match for general software engineering jobs.
Use word cloud on a job listing to count the top search words and use these top terms in your resume to get past ATS and have a real person look at your resume.
There are a lot of not-so-good jobs in the industry but pays well; if you can, ignore the ones that raise an alarm.
Reach out to recruiters and see if they can schedule and interview, be polite with them, they are amazing people.
Reach out to “Software managers” at your target company as they have more powers but gets less emails.
Dont panic, you can do this. Keep your ambitions high.
Negotiate your salary smartly once you have an offer, managers will most likely raise the numbers from initial offer.

System design starts from Day 1, dont be overconfident that you can do something in 7 days. Well, you can but your system will be shit. Grooking/AWS architecture designs on youtube in a good place to start.
Keep on solving, practicing and revising leetcode/hackerrank/CTCI problems.
Try to go through more problems and map them based on the optimal strageies you know but dont code everything.
Have a cheat sheet of all the basic data structure or details of the programming languag you prefer.
Solve leetcode top interview problems.
Know the runtime and space complexities of your solution and the optimal solution.
Solve leetcode all the big companies Top 20 questions. Say Amazon top 20, Facebook top 20, Google top 20 and so on.
Before onsite – go through glassdoor/CareerCup last 3 months interview questions for that company to get a high level idea whats going on right now at that company.
If you read this far, find what works best for you. My tips are hardly enough.