The Coding Interview

The coding interview is by far the most stressful and crucial step in any job application for a software engineering position, companies use this kind of assessment to filter candidates according to their technical and problem-solving skills in addition to their soft skills.

There are several screening techniques companies like to use but most of the time they would either call you for an onsite whiteboard interview, provide you with a take home assessment or invite you for an online coding interview with a senior engineer. Regardless of the method, the objective remains the same, it is to check your ability to think outside the box and come up with efficient solutions for complex problems and also to evaluate your communication skills which usually is achieved by thinking out loud with your interviewer and not just gazing at the problem statement for hours.

After passing the initial screening phase, your recruiter will either brief you on what is going to happen next or they would just send you a take home assessment which you need to submit before a certain date. For the latter, after your submission you will be invited for an online conference with an engineer to discuss your answers and how can you improve the algorithm you came up with so that it runs faster (we are talking space and time complexity, that will be for another article).

Google's mock phone screening:

The type of questions you may get depends on the screening method you are required to go through, for example a take home assessment for a frontend engineer would usually include things like creating an HTML page, some CSS for styling and JavaScript for interactions and API calls or the usage of a framework that the company is using whereby a backend engineer application would focus more on writing efficient algorithms to interact with a database or send data to the frontend with some authentication implemented to it.

On the other hand, both white board assessments and online interviews would mostly make use of brain teasers to assess your data structures and algorithms knowledge so understanding different searching and sorting algorithms and some data structures like hash maps, stacks, queues, heaps and arrays is very important for these kind of assessments.

Google's whiteboard interview:

Microsoft mock online interview:

There are plenty of resources out there to prepare you for these sort of interviews like hackkerank, codewars and leetcode in addition to “cracking the coding interview” which is a book that contains some of the most common interview questions from giant tech companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Netflix.