My experience of cracking coding interviews

Hey there!

This is my first post and am very happy that it’s about my favorite topic “Coding Interviews”. Let’s go on to the topic.

Are the coding interviews easy ? No, they are not easy. You need constant dedication and hard-work to master it. In this post I will explain about my journey, lessons learnt and key take away.

Fear and Struggle
When I was in college, making my baby steps in programming, I was solving problems on arrays, strings easily but when it comes to linked lists, trees and graphs I always got afraid of them. They were nightmares for me. Later, somehow I got job in MNC without touching them. I joined the company and I was given with role of QA. I didn’t like the job, in fact, hated it. Then, I quit it. I started applying for big companies. I went to amazon interview, there I was asked to write code on paper. The problems are based on linked lists and trees. Then, I started picking problems from geeks4geeks and solving them. The hurdle I faced is when I stuck somewhere, I have to clarify on myself. Then, I started exploring different resources. I will be listing them on end of the post.

Success
After all my real struggle, I somehow grabbed a paid internship in a fintech startup. I gave many interviews in small and big companies, rejected in many of them, started learning from them. The one best practice I followed is, If I was rejected by a company, I never felt sad, instead I solve the questions asked in the interview. It helped me very much that I never forget them in life. So, all my struggles end up, when I went to the interview of bigbasket. When I was in last round, I didn’t feel nervous, One thing I kept chanting in my mind ”If I fail in this interview, will I give up coding ? No, If I get succeed, will I give up ? . Either you fail or succeed, only thing you know is coding. Except coding, you know nothing.”. I cracked the interview, got offer.

Time for a raise
After one and half year of my tenure with bigbasket, I felt that I need a raise. Then, I started my journey again. This time, I was improved a lot in both coding and system design. Work at bigbasket, taught me so many things. I started with a company called “coviam”. I have cleared online coding test, then a on-site interview. Cleared first two F2F rounds, interviewers are impressed by my knowledge and quickness in coming up with solutions. But rejected in third round. The more important thing here is to handle rejection. Despite rejected, I didn’t feel bad, I got a confidence and I felt I did well. Rejected from hackerrank, soroco, ninjacart, greedy game, tracxn, niki.ai, moengage and springboard.

Heartbreaks
I attended the interviews of hackerrank, bankbazaar, groupon, grab and flipkart. Even I took leaves for preparation. Felt very bad after rejected from these, because there are quality engineers in these companies, If I join there, despite of money I can learn more. Completing all rounds, HR tells me “we will get back to you after the team having discussion”, I was excited and expecting an offer, HR won’t respond but I have an ego that not to ask them, but out of anxiety ask them, get rejected email. The same thing repeated each and every time. It gave me a heart-break :P

Here are the key take-aways from my experience:

1. Never Ever feel bad for rejection. Instead learn things from it
2. Practice, Practice and Practice is the only mantra.
3. When I got rejected from big companies, one thing I realized is that “fear”. After going through their interview experiences, I was afraid that their interviews are tough. So, even when I get a simple question in interview, I think it in a complex way. If I loose that fear and attempt the question then I might have cracked it.

Here are the resource that I followed:

For Data Structures and Algorithms:

For System Design :

System Design is also a very important topic asked in interviews. Here are the resources to follow:

Best Practices to Follow:

1. Solve at least one problem a day. Go to interviewbit, there you can chose a problem randomly and solve.
2. Give more and more mock interviews, it gives lot of confidence.

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