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Ask HN: how to best prepare for a technical interview at a top software company

6 points| xiaoma | 13 years ago | reply

Hi, all. I've been a long-time participant on HN. I was here from the beginning as a lurker, viewing all of the interesting developments in the startup world from afar as I ran an English teaching school in Taiwan. Over the past few years I went from a brick and mortar business guy to a blogger to someone who coded small things out of interest to a semi-technical guy at a start-up in China. Last summer I made a move to SF and it was rough.

But now, I'm finally in the position I've wanted. I'm in the interview pipeline both at start-ups and at two of the top software companies in the world. I've been through intense study over the past few months and have been building things, but I've never been through the interview process at a top-tier software company.

I've been reviewing algorithms. Anyone with experience getting into MS/FB/GOOG/AMZN etc have any favorite interview prepping resources?

I've worked with a bunch of technologies, but JavaScript is definitely my strength and the roles I'm interviewing for are all either front-end or full-stack. As usual, thanks for sharing your experience and advice. This site and community has already changed the direction of my life.

5 comments

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[+] donavanm|13 years ago|reply
Know how to implement basic data structures and when to use them. Know graph/tree traversal, breadth v depth etc. Explain Big O notation of your implementation and efficiency trade offs. know how how/when to use alternatives when resource constrained, ie sorting a data set bigger than main memory. Be able to implement, and iterate, these on a whiteboard (practice!). If you can do all this you're most of the way there. Ps I found working through _programming interviews exposed_ as good practice.
[+] xiaoma|13 years ago|reply
Thank you much. As soon as I get back from the photohackday (actually weekend) hackathon I'll have a look at them and work through as many as possible!
[+] nimajalali|13 years ago|reply
Not sure how much time you have but this has helped me a lot.

http://codingforinterviews.com/

It doesn't look like they have historic emails but if you shoot me an email I'll forward them to you.