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How To Increase Your Odds of Success at Whiteboard Coding Interviews
9 hacks to make your whiteboard coding process easier
The interview process for software engineering positions usually involves one 45-minute round of whiteboard coding. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, whiteboard coding literally happened in front of a whiteboard if you were applying to local companies. Nowadays, coding interviews take place over an interactive coding web application such as CoderPad.
Even if you’re a mid-to-senior-level developer, a coding interview is always a big challenge. It doesn’t really test your day-to-day job in dealing with frameworks and architectures, but it’s the test of your fundamental knowledge in data structures and algorithms.
If you can’t solve a question during a coding interview, there could be three reasons:
- You’re not lucky. You didn’t get a question you’ve seen before.
- You didn’t practice. In this case, you can mess up even an easy question.
- The question is really hard. Even though you’re given a couple of more hours, you won’t be able to solve it.
To tackle the last point, you must be an exceptional coder or have been training consistently for a long time. Tackling the first two points is a lot easier.
In this article, I’m going to share nine hacks to increase your odds of solving a question during a coding interview. These tips are not for interviews at top-tier tech companies like Google, Facebook, or Amazon. They are for lower-tier companies that give you a better chance of success.
1. Prepare for at Least Two Weeks
Going into battle without preparation is suicide. No matter how many interviews you’ve been through in the past, your fundamentals become rusty if you don’t use or practice them daily.
You need some time to get the knowledge back to the top of your brain. Depending on how much you remember from school and previous interview preparation, you might need more than two weeks to refresh your memory. What should you prepare? You’ll find out in the next few sections.
