Whiteboard Advice
- Restate the Question understand what they’re asking you to do, Prove it. Restate the question for them and seek affirmation
- Ask About Edge Cases Think for a bit about the inputs and expected output and think about potential edge cases to the problem
- Write Pseudocode and Ask If It Makes Sense You’ll find yourself constrained by trying to remember the methods or other idiosyncrasies of the language rather than trying to come up with the correct logic
- Write the Actual Code and Ask if it Looks Good
- Stuck? Ask for Help! If you’re having trouble along the way, it’s not illegal to ask for some help. Just phrase it conversationally.
- Communicating Prior to the Interview You should have a human resources or interview point of contact prior to the interview.
We’re All Human
Your interviewer has been in your position and understands the stress of a technical interview. Your interviewer has probably seen quite a few candidates sweating it out, but possibly very few open who openly discuss problems in a conversational manner.
7 tips to ace a programming interview
- Take a few minutes. Speaking as an interview coach
- Write down the steps of the solution. Even after you have an idea of how to attack the problem, don’t start writing code down. Write down the general steps of how you will solve it on one side of the whiteboard, where it’s visible but won’t get in the way.
- Write pseudocode first.
- Don’t sweat the small stuff. Programming interviews are not about how well you’ve remembered your semicolons, nor are they about being able to remember all of the flags on a TCP packet.
- Sit down. Be humble. It’s an assessment of your programming abilities, and there are plenty of things that fall into that category beyond mere coding prowess.
- Come prepared If you want to be ready, you have to put in the time. It’s important in order to maximize your chances of acing the interview, but it’s also important for your peace of mind during the interview and afterwards
- Review your work.