Coding Interview Tips How to get better at technical interviews without practicing

Chitchat like a pro.

Before diving into code, most interviewers like to chitchat about your background. They're looking for:

• Metacognition about coding. Do you think about how to code well?
• Ownership/leadership. Do you see your work through to completion? Do you fix things that aren't quite right, even if you don't have to?
• Communication. Would chatting with you about a technical problem be useful or painful?

You should have at least one:

• example of an interesting technical problem you solved
• example of an interpersonal conflict you overcame
• example of leadership or ownership
• story about what you should have done differently in a past project
• piece of trivia about your favorite language, and something you do and don't like about said language
• question about the company's product/business
• question about the company's engineering strategy (testing, Scrum, etc)

Nerd out about stuff. Show you're proud of what you've done, you're amped about what they're doing, and you have opinions about languages and workflows.

Communicate.

Once you get into the coding questions, communication is key. A candidate who needed some help along the way but communicated clearly can be even better than a candidate who breezed through the question.

Understand what kind of problem it is. There are two types of problems:

1. Coding. The interviewer wants to see you write clean, efficient code for a problem.
2. Chitchat. The interviewer just wants you to talk about something. These questions are often either (1) high-level system design ("How would you build a Twitter clone?") or (2) trivia ("What is hoisting in Javascript?"). Sometimes the trivia is a lead-in for a "real" question e.g., "How quickly can we sort a list of integers? Good, now suppose instead of integers we had . . ."