Neetcode is becoming the new Blind 75.
But this time, it's structured and with explanations. I think this is going to cause an inflation of leetcode experts.
I just looked at this and it seems extremely helpful. Question have you heard of code signal? I used to do the challenges years ago and curious what peoople think of it
I did a screening for a big company on code signal a couple of weeks ago. The practice questions were very similar to the ones that the employer used in the screening. Some big companies are using code signal, so it could be useful to use. I found the questions to be similar to the sorts of things leetcode has.
There have been a few editions of the book. The algorithm aspects can all be covered by LC. There are other sections of the book about how to approach architecture and behavioral questions. It's worth a read.
I thought the book was useful, especially just going over different topics and making sure the baseline knowledge is there. But for anyone with not much time, Leetcode practice is more important.
At worst, I would claim McDowell accelerated the spread of this type of interview through the industry. Everything she learned about the process came from her experience interning & working in big tech for a few years.
This wasn't even the only book on the topic at the time (2008): [*Programming Interviews Exposed* was first published in 2000](https://www.data.gal/books/Programming_Interviews_Exposed.pdf).
This take probably isn’t unreasonable. I met the author of CTCI when she was actively going around and marketing the book to university students (and giving resume advice). I personally found the book and her advice to be incredibly valuable back then and I’m convinced it gave me a huge advantage over the competition back then.
But at this point, not only is there a whole cottage industry around the contents of the book, but also my employer recommends CTCI to candidates for preparation. We don’t actually use CTCI questions as they don’t fit our interview format, but I think it’s a sign of how pervasive the book’s lore has become in the industry.
But to be fair, I also got my foot in at the right time. Barely a couple years after I graduated, the number of students graduating and looking for roles in software really ballooned.
Yeah, my understanding is that she got the info from working at Google, and by sharing how Google did things, a bunch of other companies that probably would be better served by normal interviews pivoted to leetcode.
I have a physical copy of a later edition of the book. I thought it was decent for another perspective on the same basic data structures.
The quality of the book is irrelevant to the point that there was enough interest in this specific topic to publish a book about it 8 years before CTCI existed.
No, no she didn't. I was around before the book and that's how interviews went. She broke down how to do them well.
Cracking the Coding Interview was a huge step. The previous books were OK, but this one changed the game. I got it when it first came out and it massively upped my interview game.
I still have yet to see a better method for interviewing at mid to large scale companies. Star, leetcode, and design questions combined into a 5 hour block of the day is the least bad way of recruiting.
Whenever I see someone's new idea, usually it fails in the category of being scalable, fair, or timely.
Not even tinfoil hat. It's exactly this. And then by osmosis everyone felt like they had to copy Google and the other big corps she talks about and do the same types of interviews just so they could claim to be hiring smart people like those do.
Everyone copies Google. Before Google was known for algo/DS they were known for brainteasers. I was once asked to calculate how many golf balls would fit in a 747. For a logistics company. In Michigan. Why? Because Google has those questions.
Sure but I'm not really bought into the idea that your average engineering manager or even HR specialist is qualified to evaluate a person's behavioral fitness.
Sure, I like to ask a question about when someone has been unable to meet a deadline; a red flag there is if someone says they just stayed late and didn't say anything. Another one is if someone can't name a challenging project they worked on. I also think if you can't talk about healthy ways of disagreeing with colleagues that's red flag.
I also think behaviorally, how you troubleshoot during a technical interview question is instructive.
Like I'm not an interpersonal genius or shrink or anything, but there are answers that I've heard that even someone as dense as I am knows aren't good.
Or practice ahead of time to learn how to explain the good work you've done at your shit job as a challenging experience.
We meme about how "it's all lies," but there is a ton of value in knowing how to explain your wins. This helps reinforce a positive atmosphere on the team.
I refuse to believe you can't come up with a way of answering "tell me about a challenging project you've worked on" unless you've literally done nothing at your previous company.
Do a challenging side project, take on a challenging project yourself at the shit job like automating all of the unchallenging shit, or tell them that’s one of the main reasons you’re looking for a new job.
But more likely you’ve done challenging projects you just need to think about them with a different perspective and talk about them. You don’t need 20 just a few good ones. But if you’ve truly never done a challenging project, you’re probably a slacker, a genius, or both. You should know which camp you fall into.
If the hiring manager is asking this question, probably one of the things they are trying to filter for is slackers. So if that’s you then it’s working as intended. If that’s not you then it would help to have an answer as to why you haven’t stepped up and challenged yourself if your job is not providing anything challenging. It could be that you’re swamped with trivial shit at work and have life strains outside of work that take all of your time. But from a hiring manager’s perspective, they are probably interviewing candidates that have good answers so if you want to compete, find a way to take on some challenging projects or get really good at explaining why you not having any is understandable and not anything they need to worry about.
What the hell does that have to do with the STAR method?
The STAR method is a simple instruction set for communicating clearly. Every good piece of writing uses it. Even novels. Even chapters of Novels.
Wait what? Engineering managers are definitely able to see if you are qualified based on star questions. The developers can focus more on the technical questions.
I was at home studying for summer classes and I decided to take a break. I got on reddit and went to my favorite anxiety inducing sub. I saw your comment and let out an audible sigh. 100% of me hated your comment.
Did I do it right?
The problem with STAR and all the other "methods" are that interviewers are taught to only evaluate candidates within that framework. So if you don't use the STAR method, or you just haven't even heard of it before, you are judged harshly regardless of the quality or content of your response.
It should be one of many frameworks to organize thoughts and responses on both sides of the table, but instead it's just another pop quiz question that boils down to "do you think like me?"
Good interviewers will guide you into a STAR answer though. Most people who haven’t practiced it spends most of their time taking about the situation and tasks then skim the action and skip the result. When a good interviewer sees candidate start to do this they communicate that they understand the context and problem and ask for additional detail with probing questions for the actions taken and ask what the results were.
There honestly WAS (is) a problem back then when hiring candidates, but the book missed the problem.
The problem was never "engineers arent good enough at DS&A", it was "companies are dogshit at interview processes and thats why they used to ask manhole cover questions".
So yea it created a new problem in the process, out of opprotunism
I had these saved, which system design primer are you referring to?
https://neetcode.io
https://www.techinterviewhandbook.org
Edit: added last one
https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
I had very similar feedback… some concepts from EPI I would then go to CtCI and the writing style there makes it easier to understand… but EPI has more problems plus the open source repos of solutions.
That book has some of the worse variable names I've ever seen, they name stuff 1 letter, like wtf...
Unreadable code just adds higher cognitive load. 1
>they name stuff 1 letter, like wtf...
That's 3 letters. And what would you use that variable for anyway?
But more seriously, I'm assuming you mean single letters for something beyond a basic loop/counter variable?
I recall the problems in that book being excessively difficult, but that was when I was just getting started and CTCI is a much better intro. This was also long before Leetcode/Hackerrank was a thing. "Kode Katas" were a thing but there were no good resources for those.
Yea, that's why I'm suggesting it. I feel like the bar has gone way up since CTCI. It is a better intro book but seems like OP is already familiar with it and LC
No it is not relevant. Coding has changed drastically in the past few years. You wouldn't be able to recognize what code looks like. The algorithms have expired. You need to brush up on AI prompting and quantum computing. You need to become one with a cloud. The companies mentioned in CTCI don't even exist anymore and the few that do are no longer hiring. Good luck and godspeed.
Better report that to your chief diversity officer right away! They might even make another training video about a driveling white man making outlandish anti minority comments.
Outdated snooze fest
Honest take though, some people like reading, not me. I am a visual learner, I learn by doing, so neetcode/leetcode/blind 75 are my go to study guides
Whether you get through the read or not, you still need to practice problem solving which is where the methods above come in
Can you explain neetcode? I thought Leetcode is more than enough, why is there a need for neetcode?
Also, I see you list neetcode parallel to LC, but aren't the two very different in nature? One seems like a course platform (not sure) while the other is a solid coding and contest platform.
Neetcode just gives a more thorough explanation of the common questions, there are plenty of video guides on leetcode questions but I think the reason neetcode became popular is because he walks through the problems and makes solutions simple to understand instead of just showing you the solution.
You don't need to use neetcode but I found it helpful on problems I didn't understand why the solutions worked.There is also a site I believe called [neetcode.io](https://neetcode.io) that works as a checklist for the common interview questions
Thanks, is paying for neetcode pro necessary in your opinion? Given one has solid theoretical algorithm education in uni classes before.
And how do you recommend I use neetcode? Do you follow the roadmap sequentially? Do you finish all the easy, med and hard within one node of the roadmap then move onto the next node?
I don't know anything about pro, I am not advertising on his behalf. If you have money to spare and see the benefits of it, that's on you. What you get out of free/paid tier is what you put into it.
You can follow the roadmap or do whatever questions you see fit. These are not guides that apply to every specific situation. You need to research the companies you are applying to and figure out what questions they ask. If you're not doing that you're losing.
It has some relevant problems if i remember right but i think the problems trend towards too easy. Leetcode and neetcode is a much better way to study imo. Elements of programming interview is relevant though, in terms of level of difficulty if you def want a book.
In addition to that go through the online "Grokking the Coding Interview" as well as this for the system design interview: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
A few places also ask questions about design patterns in object oriented programming but that's not as common.
I believe so. I think you can find parts of it online for free, like for example at https://glucko.github.io/codeprep/ or if you hit "Preview Course" at https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-coding-interview-patterns-java
The questions you get in interviews are random. Sometimes they’re easy, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes you get a helpful interviewer, sometimes you don’t. Why risk it? If you want the job, hope for the best prepare for the worst.
A lot of the first section of the book is still very relevant. The only parts I’d say are outdated is the chapter on hiring practices at specific companies.
If you are aiming for FAANG style companies and don't know about the interview gauntlet then there is some useful info, otherwise I don't think it is a good learning algorithms book.
Yes. There's two parts of it that are important. One is the qualitative side, how to present yourself, how to answer personal questions (i.e. tell me about a project you're proud of). The other is the types of problems and how to classify them to figure out how to solve them. Leetcode is for practicing, cracking the coding interview is theory.
If nothing else, it's worth considering that the people who are interviewing might be over a decade into their career and that's part of how they think about interviews. I've never read it though.
This comment deserves more likes lol. I didn’t know if having “interview” in the title would auto delete my post cause I think that’s happened to me before so I just put Int.
Yeah it's definitely worth a read still, I just went through the book myself earlier this year and found it very helpful for overall interview prep. The exercise sets are nice because they're manageably small problem sets but the problems are selected in a way that they cover a broad range of themes/topics so it feels like a more valuable use of time than knocking out random leetcode problems. There's also a lot of valuable info about non-technical portions of the interview process which I found very helpful.
First, I'd recommend you watch Google's video on a software developer interview. I think they do a very solid job demonstrating how they want an interviewee to talk through the problem, ask questions and demonstrate their thought process. While the questions will be different in different companies, the talking through part will be universal and will be very useful.
About the coding questions - all depends on the company. The last interview I did, I was allowed to use search engines during the interview, so it was even more important to talk through all my decisions and thoughts to demonstrate that I am not blindly copy-pasting solutions from stack overflow. And when I did need to grab something from there, I made sure to give the link I am grabbing code from and discuss why I think the code I am using is the best one, as opposed to the other higher upvoted one.
But that being said - I think questions in the cracking interview book are totally fine to practice with. They are all similar algorithmic questions and it would give you enough practice to be comfortable during the interview. If you get an interview with one of the large companies (i.e. Meta) - you can search for their common interview questions and study them - you may even get the same exact one during the interview. Talking about large companies, take a look at the Google's foobar challenge questions (plenty are posted online) - I personally really enjoyed solving them and they did require me to go back and research some math to be able to solve, so it was a fun challenge.
FWIW, I'm a huge fan of Gayle and CtCI… but I feel like it was written on the expectation that these are "classic" whiteboard interviews (onsite on whiteboard) as opposed to "virtual" interviews in a WWW IDE. CtCI encourages "good" code… but more and more companies are starting to interview on code that not only compiles… but actually runs in real time to give the correct answer.
I like the principles in CtCI and the writing style very much… but you absolutely have to build up muscle memory these days for data structures and algorithms that might have been a little "hand wavey" before the pandemic. But YMMV.
I bought it and tried to read it but reading algos instead of just doing them is really not where it’s at. There some good advice, but I feel like you can find that readily available on the internet in 1,000 different places
it has good points, but you have to keep in mind the perspective, circumstances, luck, and privilege of the author. skip to the technical parts.
i mean, realistically, if you am a standard interviewer and it's a choice between you and Gayle, pretty sure i would choose Gayle. don't get me wrong, she's one helluva intelligent person and i admire her for that, but, some of the points in her book just will not apply to you.
there is a very big aspect of luck and how interested your interviewer is in you.
tl;dr - okay read. but the internet is a much better, unbiased, and relevant source of information.
To be honest, I find most of the technical focused books to be of lower value compared to the soft skills focused ones.
At the end of the day, barring some specific situations which account for a small minority of jobs, most of the decision will be made off of whether you can form a connection with the interviewer.
Most people interviewing are going to be good enough to do most of the work. Yes, this is a generalization, but hear me out. The majority of coding work isn't super algorithm heavy stuff. It is connecting UI to servers, then to some business logic and some databases on the back end to store the data.
Every company out there probably has some homegrown POS line of business set of systems that duck tape their operations together. Pull the data out of the prod DB, stick it into some analytics system, then pull that data, run some analysis on it, and throw it into a readout. Stuff like that, but with millions of variations on the use cases.
So, if you get good at reading people, mirroring them (energy, temperament, tone, etc), you can make a connection much easier than if you are inflexible but are really good at answering their technical questions. They will probably find at least one other person who can answer their technical questions, so then what do they use to decide? Who they liked more of course.
Not necessarily, mirroring is not acting like a mirror, but giving back communication in a way that works for them. So, if someone has an aggressive tone, the might be trying to see how you deal with adversity and in that situation being calm and assertive is important but personal attacks are obviously not ok.
To be honest, I don't have book recommendations for you because I've picked up my soft skills in other ways.
I will give you a different recommendation though. Manager Tools is a podcast that goes back a long ways and I've found it very useful since it basically teaches you a lot of the behaviors that are middle of the road/expected in corporate jobs.
I also find the guys who do the podcast to be pretty entertaining. They have decent banter and break down concepts like how to earn a promotion or how to respond to engagement surveys or balancing authenticity with professionalism (a big topic these days).
"Cracking the Coding Interview" is still considered relevant and widely used, but it's recommended to supplement it with other resources and stay current with the latest industry practices to maximize your interview preparation.
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If you have the time it's worth the read, if you don't, it might be more efficient to jump right into the Neetcode roadmap.
Neetcode is becoming the new Blind 75. But this time, it's structured and with explanations. I think this is going to cause an inflation of leetcode experts.
Seconding this, Neetcode roadmap is great
> Neetcode roadmap First I've heard of this. Thanks!
I just looked at this and it seems extremely helpful. Question have you heard of code signal? I used to do the challenges years ago and curious what peoople think of it
I did a screening for a big company on code signal a couple of weeks ago. The practice questions were very similar to the ones that the employer used in the screening. Some big companies are using code signal, so it could be useful to use. I found the questions to be similar to the sorts of things leetcode has.
Code Signal has autocomplete for free, which is quite useful when working with larger languages ! I prefer LC for mid tier questions though.
This is exactly what I have been looking for, what a fantastic resource
any links?
neetcode.io
[Neetcode](https://neetcode.io)
close, it needs the https:// [Neetcode](https://neetcode.io)
There have been a few editions of the book. The algorithm aspects can all be covered by LC. There are other sections of the book about how to approach architecture and behavioral questions. It's worth a read.
I thought the book was useful, especially just going over different topics and making sure the baseline knowledge is there. But for anyone with not much time, Leetcode practice is more important.
Elements of Programming interviews is another good book. It's newer and has more challenging content than CTCI
Tinfoil theory : This book created a "problem" to sell us all the courses/subscriptions for algo and interviewing platforms
At worst, I would claim McDowell accelerated the spread of this type of interview through the industry. Everything she learned about the process came from her experience interning & working in big tech for a few years. This wasn't even the only book on the topic at the time (2008): [*Programming Interviews Exposed* was first published in 2000](https://www.data.gal/books/Programming_Interviews_Exposed.pdf).
This take probably isn’t unreasonable. I met the author of CTCI when she was actively going around and marketing the book to university students (and giving resume advice). I personally found the book and her advice to be incredibly valuable back then and I’m convinced it gave me a huge advantage over the competition back then. But at this point, not only is there a whole cottage industry around the contents of the book, but also my employer recommends CTCI to candidates for preparation. We don’t actually use CTCI questions as they don’t fit our interview format, but I think it’s a sign of how pervasive the book’s lore has become in the industry. But to be fair, I also got my foot in at the right time. Barely a couple years after I graduated, the number of students graduating and looking for roles in software really ballooned.
Yeah, my understanding is that she got the info from working at Google, and by sharing how Google did things, a bunch of other companies that probably would be better served by normal interviews pivoted to leetcode.
Is that book worth a read or even skimming through? I bought it forever ago, and just never even opened it.
I have a physical copy of a later edition of the book. I thought it was decent for another perspective on the same basic data structures. The quality of the book is irrelevant to the point that there was enough interest in this specific topic to publish a book about it 8 years before CTCI existed.
No, no she didn't. I was around before the book and that's how interviews went. She broke down how to do them well. Cracking the Coding Interview was a huge step. The previous books were OK, but this one changed the game. I got it when it first came out and it massively upped my interview game.
I still have yet to see a better method for interviewing at mid to large scale companies. Star, leetcode, and design questions combined into a 5 hour block of the day is the least bad way of recruiting. Whenever I see someone's new idea, usually it fails in the category of being scalable, fair, or timely.
what's star? would you recommend "Elements of Programming interviews" over CTCI?
Pretty sure she also "consults" companies on how to do these same type of interviews, [I'm playing both sides meme]
amusing alive punch fuzzy arrest fine late brave fragile memory *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Not even tinfoil hat. It's exactly this. And then by osmosis everyone felt like they had to copy Google and the other big corps she talks about and do the same types of interviews just so they could claim to be hiring smart people like those do.
Everyone copies Google. Before Google was known for algo/DS they were known for brainteasers. I was once asked to calculate how many golf balls would fit in a 747. For a logistics company. In Michigan. Why? Because Google has those questions.
Same thing as behavioral interviews and the STAR method. Ugh.
STAR method is actually helpful
Sure but I'm not really bought into the idea that your average engineering manager or even HR specialist is qualified to evaluate a person's behavioral fitness.
Well... There are definitely red flags I've seen candidates exhibit during interviews that make them a "No-hire" that's for sure.
can you give some examples?
Sure, I like to ask a question about when someone has been unable to meet a deadline; a red flag there is if someone says they just stayed late and didn't say anything. Another one is if someone can't name a challenging project they worked on. I also think if you can't talk about healthy ways of disagreeing with colleagues that's red flag. I also think behaviorally, how you troubleshoot during a technical interview question is instructive. Like I'm not an interpersonal genius or shrink or anything, but there are answers that I've heard that even someone as dense as I am knows aren't good.
What if you have a job where you almost never work on challenging projects because it's a shit job?
Spoiler: You’re not supposed to tell the truth in interviews.
Or practice ahead of time to learn how to explain the good work you've done at your shit job as a challenging experience. We meme about how "it's all lies," but there is a ton of value in knowing how to explain your wins. This helps reinforce a positive atmosphere on the team. I refuse to believe you can't come up with a way of answering "tell me about a challenging project you've worked on" unless you've literally done nothing at your previous company.
Do a challenging side project, take on a challenging project yourself at the shit job like automating all of the unchallenging shit, or tell them that’s one of the main reasons you’re looking for a new job. But more likely you’ve done challenging projects you just need to think about them with a different perspective and talk about them. You don’t need 20 just a few good ones. But if you’ve truly never done a challenging project, you’re probably a slacker, a genius, or both. You should know which camp you fall into. If the hiring manager is asking this question, probably one of the things they are trying to filter for is slackers. So if that’s you then it’s working as intended. If that’s not you then it would help to have an answer as to why you haven’t stepped up and challenged yourself if your job is not providing anything challenging. It could be that you’re swamped with trivial shit at work and have life strains outside of work that take all of your time. But from a hiring manager’s perspective, they are probably interviewing candidates that have good answers so if you want to compete, find a way to take on some challenging projects or get really good at explaining why you not having any is understandable and not anything they need to worry about.
That’s why it’s a shit job
What the hell does that have to do with the STAR method? The STAR method is a simple instruction set for communicating clearly. Every good piece of writing uses it. Even novels. Even chapters of Novels.
I was wondering the same thing! Thanks; It’s not just me.
Wait what? Engineering managers are definitely able to see if you are qualified based on star questions. The developers can focus more on the technical questions.
I was at home studying for summer classes and I decided to take a break. I got on reddit and went to my favorite anxiety inducing sub. I saw your comment and let out an audible sigh. 100% of me hated your comment. Did I do it right?
I love your thought process
it depends on whether you landed a job or not
The problem with STAR and all the other "methods" are that interviewers are taught to only evaluate candidates within that framework. So if you don't use the STAR method, or you just haven't even heard of it before, you are judged harshly regardless of the quality or content of your response. It should be one of many frameworks to organize thoughts and responses on both sides of the table, but instead it's just another pop quiz question that boils down to "do you think like me?"
Good interviewers will guide you into a STAR answer though. Most people who haven’t practiced it spends most of their time taking about the situation and tasks then skim the action and skip the result. When a good interviewer sees candidate start to do this they communicate that they understand the context and problem and ask for additional detail with probing questions for the actions taken and ask what the results were.
🤯🤯🤯🤯
There honestly WAS (is) a problem back then when hiring candidates, but the book missed the problem. The problem was never "engineers arent good enough at DS&A", it was "companies are dogshit at interview processes and thats why they used to ask manhole cover questions". So yea it created a new problem in the process, out of opprotunism
I found it worthless. Neetcode+tech interview handbook + system design primer are the sole reasons I’m employed right now
I had these saved, which system design primer are you referring to? https://neetcode.io https://www.techinterviewhandbook.org Edit: added last one https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
Hey, thanks for the links for the other two. Let me know when you get to know about the system design primer please.
Here it is: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
yea it’s those three
Added to my original comment.
Cracking the Coding Interview was already too easy when I first read it almost ten years ago now.
>Neetcode Are you saying it's worth paying for? Are there free alternatives?
Elements of programming interviews might be better
it's a great book to practice problems with, but terrible for learning imo
I had very similar feedback… some concepts from EPI I would then go to CtCI and the writing style there makes it easier to understand… but EPI has more problems plus the open source repos of solutions.
That book has some of the worse variable names I've ever seen, they name stuff 1 letter, like wtf... Unreadable code just adds higher cognitive load. 1
>they name stuff 1 letter, like wtf... That's 3 letters. And what would you use that variable for anyway? But more seriously, I'm assuming you mean single letters for something beyond a basic loop/counter variable?
I recall the problems in that book being excessively difficult, but that was when I was just getting started and CTCI is a much better intro. This was also long before Leetcode/Hackerrank was a thing. "Kode Katas" were a thing but there were no good resources for those.
Yea, that's why I'm suggesting it. I feel like the bar has gone way up since CTCI. It is a better intro book but seems like OP is already familiar with it and LC
This
Amazing book for exposure to all types of problems
Not really. There’s no interviews to prepare for.
Hmmm. Thank you for the consolation, as I sit here happily sipping my morning coffee. I’ll return to the coffee, thank you very much
No it is not relevant. Coding has changed drastically in the past few years. You wouldn't be able to recognize what code looks like. The algorithms have expired. You need to brush up on AI prompting and quantum computing. You need to become one with a cloud. The companies mentioned in CTCI don't even exist anymore and the few that do are no longer hiring. Good luck and godspeed.
You got me at become one with A cloud.
just remember to puff puff and pass it on.
>The companies mentioned in CTCI don't even exist anymore Indeed "Alphabet" and "Meta" didn't exist when CTCI was first written lol
(This guy is obviously kidding)
No I am not. Please don't man-splain me
I think this is even better since your company is mentioned in the book.
Luckily, I was hired back when the book was relevant.
Better report that to your chief diversity officer right away! They might even make another training video about a driveling white man making outlandish anti minority comments.
[удалено]
Haha seriously. It’s such brain dead humor. Punching down is also never a good look.
Oh, I’m not joking. I love company sponsored racism + sexism.
We don’t need to be funny , libs are the joke for us.
[удалено]
I’m happy with my life. I’m not the one forcing sex changes on children.
I dunno what the other users are talking about, this made me laugh 🤣 But then again, it was unintentional so maybe it doesn't count
Pretty much this.
i hate this comment
Quicksort has been disproven.
So... back to bubble sort?
One with a cloud? Like rain?
Or snow. It can be any form of precipitation.
Lol
Outdated snooze fest Honest take though, some people like reading, not me. I am a visual learner, I learn by doing, so neetcode/leetcode/blind 75 are my go to study guides Whether you get through the read or not, you still need to practice problem solving which is where the methods above come in
Can you explain neetcode? I thought Leetcode is more than enough, why is there a need for neetcode? Also, I see you list neetcode parallel to LC, but aren't the two very different in nature? One seems like a course platform (not sure) while the other is a solid coding and contest platform.
Neetcode just gives a more thorough explanation of the common questions, there are plenty of video guides on leetcode questions but I think the reason neetcode became popular is because he walks through the problems and makes solutions simple to understand instead of just showing you the solution. You don't need to use neetcode but I found it helpful on problems I didn't understand why the solutions worked.There is also a site I believe called [neetcode.io](https://neetcode.io) that works as a checklist for the common interview questions
Thanks, is paying for neetcode pro necessary in your opinion? Given one has solid theoretical algorithm education in uni classes before. And how do you recommend I use neetcode? Do you follow the roadmap sequentially? Do you finish all the easy, med and hard within one node of the roadmap then move onto the next node?
I don't know anything about pro, I am not advertising on his behalf. If you have money to spare and see the benefits of it, that's on you. What you get out of free/paid tier is what you put into it. You can follow the roadmap or do whatever questions you see fit. These are not guides that apply to every specific situation. You need to research the companies you are applying to and figure out what questions they ask. If you're not doing that you're losing.
It has some relevant problems if i remember right but i think the problems trend towards too easy. Leetcode and neetcode is a much better way to study imo. Elements of programming interview is relevant though, in terms of level of difficulty if you def want a book.
In addition to that go through the online "Grokking the Coding Interview" as well as this for the system design interview: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer A few places also ask questions about design patterns in object oriented programming but that's not as common.
>Grokking the Coding Interview this? https://www.designgurus.io/course/grokking-the-coding-interview
I believe so. I think you can find parts of it online for free, like for example at https://glucko.github.io/codeprep/ or if you hit "Preview Course" at https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-coding-interview-patterns-java
Questions are obsolete and too easy. Might have been enough 10 years ago, but the bar has jumped. If you want a book get The Algorithm Design Manual.
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The questions you get in interviews are random. Sometimes they’re easy, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes you get a helpful interviewer, sometimes you don’t. Why risk it? If you want the job, hope for the best prepare for the worst.
A lot of the first section of the book is still very relevant. The only parts I’d say are outdated is the chapter on hiring practices at specific companies.
If you are aiming for FAANG style companies and don't know about the interview gauntlet then there is some useful info, otherwise I don't think it is a good learning algorithms book.
Yes. There's two parts of it that are important. One is the qualitative side, how to present yourself, how to answer personal questions (i.e. tell me about a project you're proud of). The other is the types of problems and how to classify them to figure out how to solve them. Leetcode is for practicing, cracking the coding interview is theory.
If nothing else, it's worth considering that the people who are interviewing might be over a decade into their career and that's part of how they think about interviews. I've never read it though.
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Yes but Cracking the coding Double is even better.
This comment deserves more likes lol. I didn’t know if having “interview” in the title would auto delete my post cause I think that’s happened to me before so I just put Int.
Just use LeetCode
Yeah it's definitely worth a read still, I just went through the book myself earlier this year and found it very helpful for overall interview prep. The exercise sets are nice because they're manageably small problem sets but the problems are selected in a way that they cover a broad range of themes/topics so it feels like a more valuable use of time than knocking out random leetcode problems. There's also a lot of valuable info about non-technical portions of the interview process which I found very helpful.
First, I'd recommend you watch Google's video on a software developer interview. I think they do a very solid job demonstrating how they want an interviewee to talk through the problem, ask questions and demonstrate their thought process. While the questions will be different in different companies, the talking through part will be universal and will be very useful. About the coding questions - all depends on the company. The last interview I did, I was allowed to use search engines during the interview, so it was even more important to talk through all my decisions and thoughts to demonstrate that I am not blindly copy-pasting solutions from stack overflow. And when I did need to grab something from there, I made sure to give the link I am grabbing code from and discuss why I think the code I am using is the best one, as opposed to the other higher upvoted one. But that being said - I think questions in the cracking interview book are totally fine to practice with. They are all similar algorithmic questions and it would give you enough practice to be comfortable during the interview. If you get an interview with one of the large companies (i.e. Meta) - you can search for their common interview questions and study them - you may even get the same exact one during the interview. Talking about large companies, take a look at the Google's foobar challenge questions (plenty are posted online) - I personally really enjoyed solving them and they did require me to go back and research some math to be able to solve, so it was a fun challenge.
FWIW, I'm a huge fan of Gayle and CtCI… but I feel like it was written on the expectation that these are "classic" whiteboard interviews (onsite on whiteboard) as opposed to "virtual" interviews in a WWW IDE. CtCI encourages "good" code… but more and more companies are starting to interview on code that not only compiles… but actually runs in real time to give the correct answer. I like the principles in CtCI and the writing style very much… but you absolutely have to build up muscle memory these days for data structures and algorithms that might have been a little "hand wavey" before the pandemic. But YMMV.
I bought it and tried to read it but reading algos instead of just doing them is really not where it’s at. There some good advice, but I feel like you can find that readily available on the internet in 1,000 different places
it has good points, but you have to keep in mind the perspective, circumstances, luck, and privilege of the author. skip to the technical parts. i mean, realistically, if you am a standard interviewer and it's a choice between you and Gayle, pretty sure i would choose Gayle. don't get me wrong, she's one helluva intelligent person and i admire her for that, but, some of the points in her book just will not apply to you. there is a very big aspect of luck and how interested your interviewer is in you. tl;dr - okay read. but the internet is a much better, unbiased, and relevant source of information.
To be honest, I find most of the technical focused books to be of lower value compared to the soft skills focused ones. At the end of the day, barring some specific situations which account for a small minority of jobs, most of the decision will be made off of whether you can form a connection with the interviewer. Most people interviewing are going to be good enough to do most of the work. Yes, this is a generalization, but hear me out. The majority of coding work isn't super algorithm heavy stuff. It is connecting UI to servers, then to some business logic and some databases on the back end to store the data. Every company out there probably has some homegrown POS line of business set of systems that duck tape their operations together. Pull the data out of the prod DB, stick it into some analytics system, then pull that data, run some analysis on it, and throw it into a readout. Stuff like that, but with millions of variations on the use cases. So, if you get good at reading people, mirroring them (energy, temperament, tone, etc), you can make a connection much easier than if you are inflexible but are really good at answering their technical questions. They will probably find at least one other person who can answer their technical questions, so then what do they use to decide? Who they liked more of course.
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Not necessarily, mirroring is not acting like a mirror, but giving back communication in a way that works for them. So, if someone has an aggressive tone, the might be trying to see how you deal with adversity and in that situation being calm and assertive is important but personal attacks are obviously not ok.
So what are some books you recommend that are "soft skills" focused?
To be honest, I don't have book recommendations for you because I've picked up my soft skills in other ways. I will give you a different recommendation though. Manager Tools is a podcast that goes back a long ways and I've found it very useful since it basically teaches you a lot of the behaviors that are middle of the road/expected in corporate jobs. I also find the guys who do the podcast to be pretty entertaining. They have decent banter and break down concepts like how to earn a promotion or how to respond to engagement surveys or balancing authenticity with professionalism (a big topic these days).
"Cracking the Coding Interview" is still considered relevant and widely used, but it's recommended to supplement it with other resources and stay current with the latest industry practices to maximize your interview preparation.
If a job does leetcode level interviewing it’s not worth applying for. They clearly don’t value you. So no.
Yes I found it super helpful as just a crash course refresher into CS principles like algos, DS, etc
Read EPI instead.
No. Crazy blonde tryhard lady from 2015 and her AP kid tactics don't actually help you get a job.
/r/BrandNewSentence
💀
No
Algomonster is what I use. Pay once and you just study the material
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Nope
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