The ultimate goal of attending a bootcamp, beyond learning for the joy of it or following a passion, is to land a job in tech. But all exciting software engineering jobs have a barrier to entry, even if you’re qualified. That barrier to entry is the coding interview.
Apart from soft skills and resume building, the coding interview, also known as the technical interview, is arguably the most important part of landing a job at a tech company. It usually consists of one or two algorithm-style coding questions that you have to solve optimally, on a whiteboard, in 45 minutes. And you usually have to pass four or five of these coding interviews, back-to-back in a single day.
Even after going through a coding bootcamp, many people find these coding interviews very difficult and just plain scary. They require a lot of practice and some foundational knowledge related to data structures and algorithms that aren’t guaranteed to be covered in coding bootcamps. So how should you prepare for a technical interview for the software engineering job of your dreams? With AlgoExpert.
What Is AlgoExpert?
In early 2017, Clément Mihailescu had just graduated from his coding bootcamp and had a job interview lined up at Google. He knew that even after graduating from a great bootcamp, he had a lot of preparation to do on his own in order to ace the highly competitive and challenging Google technical interview; after all, he had failed a coding interview at another company just a few weeks before because he had taken it for granted and hadn’t prepared at all, thinking he could just “wing it.” To prepare for the Google interviews, he relied on the resources that were available at the time: books and the Internet.
“It was a really poor experience,” he recollected. “I had to spend hours upon hours scouring the internet for practice questions and solutions, desperately trying to find quality material, with little success. When I did find relevant resources, I had to deal with inconsistent quality and rely on coding languages that I hadn’t learned in my bootcamp. Having to read written explanations in Java or C++, when you’ve only learned Python or JavaScript, is daunting and suboptimal, to say the least.”
While Clément ended up acing his interviews at Google, he thought there had to be a better way to prepare for these kinds of interviews.
The solution? AlgoExpert. With curated questions, comprehensive video explanations, a feature-rich coding workspace, and more, AlgoExpert has all the prep material that developers need, all in one place.
What Do I Need To Know for a Coding Interview?
So, what exactly is all this prep material that you need to prepare for a coding interview? Clément and his co-founder Antoine Pourchet, an ex-Uber software engineer, have divided AlgoExpert into four major components.
Data Structures Crash Course
Data structures are the building blocks of algorithm-style coding interviews. They constitute the foundational knowledge that you absolutely need for coding interviews.
AlgoExpert’s Data Structures Crash Course gives you all the fundamentals you need to start tackling problems, even if you have zero data structures background, and serves as a great brush-up if you’re just rusty on your knowledge.
The crash course, which consists of videos and glossary terms, covers 13 topics in data structures, from Complexity Analysis and Memory to Hash Tables, Trees, and everything in between.
Coding Interview Questions
The bread and butter of AlgoExpert are the expertly curated 160 practice coding interview questions on the platform. Each question is accompanied by an in-depth two-part video explanation. This video explanation consists of a conceptual “whiteboard” overview of the algorithm at hand, covering its inner workings and space-time complexity analysis, as well as an entire coding walkthrough of the solution to this algorithm.
In addition to this, each question includes written solutions in nine popular programming languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Swift, Kotlin, C++, Java, C#, and Go. This means you don’t have to rely on a language you don’t already know.
Finally, each question also includes a full-fledged coding workspace where you can type out and run your code against premade test cases and look at hints if you need help.
The questions can be grouped by difficulty, by category, or randomly, to cater to all studying preferences. If you choose to tackle the questions in the order of difficulty, not only do you have a ton of questions to practice with, but you get to incrementally build up your skills by picking up the patterns and building blocks found in the easier questions, allowing you to solve the harder ones.
And the video explanations help you internalize these patterns and recognize them in future questions, giving you the tools to problem-solve your way through any question.
Ultimately, the curated questions and the accompanying platform make prepping for interviews simple and practical. Just choose a question. Pick a language. Read the prompt. Write your solution. Run your code. Get some hints. Run your code again. Check the output. Pass the tests. View the solution. Watch the video explanation. All within the same place.
Coding Interview Assessments
In addition to the coding questions, AlgoExpert has gone one step further by creating four coding interview assessments to simulate the real day of coding interviews. These four assessments consist of four timed questions each, carefully selected to mimic the variety that you might encounter in a day of interviews.
AlgoExpert recommends completing each assessment in a single four-hour sitting to best simulate the experience of a day of coding interviews. They recommend doing two questions first, filling the gap with an hour break, before continuing with the following two questions. The assessments are difficult, and they recommend completing 75 to 100 of the normal coding questions before tackling them.
Mock Interviews
AlgoExpert also offers mock interviews that allow you to pair up with a friend or another AlgoExpert user on a shared workspace and to do a mock coding interview, making you practice communicating your thought process out loud to an interviewer.
Preparation You Can Trust
The founding team of AlgoExpert has lived and breathed coding interviews for over four years now. The two co-founders have worked for Google, Facebook, and Uber between them, not to mention the other members of the team who have worked for companies like Microsoft and Amazon. They all know what companies are looking for in technical interviews and what you need to do to prepare for them.
And they’ve helped nearly 100,000 software engineers ace their interviews and land their dream job. You can see some of their customer success stories here.
AlgoExpert is a formidable tool to prepare for coding interviews. It gives you everything you need to prepare, all in one platform. It is made to be easily digestible and easy to follow. If you’re interested in using AlgoExpert to prepare for your dream job, check it out here.
About us: Career Karma is a platform designed to help job seekers find, research, and connect with job training programs to advance their careers. Learn about the CK publication.
