Coding interviews usually serve as the doorway into getting hired by big tech companies. In order to be successful during coding interviews, many students spend months preparing for their coding interview by solving hundreds of DSA problems. However, after dedicating all of this time and energy, many students still do not perform well on their coding interview. Therefore, the question must be asked: Why do students fail at their coding interviews even if they practice solving hundreds of problems?
The answer for this is simple: While preparing for a coding interview, there is much more to preparing than just solving a large number of coding problems.
Quality vs Quantity
One of the main mistakes that most students make while preparing for a coding interview is that they prepare for it using a quantity-based approach to solving problems. For example, if a student solves 500 coding problems, it is of little use if they do not understand how to solve those problems or only have memorised the algorithms rather than understanding how to use them.
Most students are guilty of sacrificing their analysis of each problem and instead, using quantity as the basis of their preparation, which leads them to have a poor understanding of each type of problem. When they are asked to solve a coding question during their coding interview that is different from their original coding problem, they will often become very confused and unprepared.
The understanding of essential concepts is lacking.
Students may be unable to solve advanced problems without mastering data structures, algorithms, and time and space complexity analysis. While they may understand how a solution should be implemented, they have difficulty understanding the reason for doing so, and thus cannot provide rationale.
Interviewers typically ask follow-up questions regarding the optimization, performance, and other methods for the solution to assess the level of understanding. The student that studied for the interview using memorized solutions will probably have difficulty answering the follow-up questions.
Poor communication skills in interviews.
Technical interviews are not just about coding talent; it's not a silent coded contest. The interviewers expect to see how you think about the problem, how you decompose it, and how you arrive to the appropriate solution.
Students typically have put in a lot of time on coding over a period of months, but have failed to work on their communication skills. Therefore, they may have a viable solution in their head during the interview, but are not able to articulate it in words.
Not Being Able to Work with New Types of Problems in Interview Situations
There is a certain level of coding discipline that may cause candidates to rely too heavily on previous experience when faced with something completely new in an interview setting. Often, this causes panic to set in for the candidate because they have never been presented with anything like what they are currently facing.
A candidate's adaptability should be determined in an interview by their ability to analyze the unknown problem they are facing and provide an original solution.
Weak Testing and Debugging Skills
Typically, students will spend the entire time in an interview working on how to get the solution they created to work. Each candidate must complete their coding interview using either a whiteboard or other collaborative editing tool. At this point in the coding process, debugging needs to happen before finalizing the solution.
Many interviewers will penalize candidates if they fail to test their code systematically and repair any logical problems that were present in their code.
Inadequate Mock Interviewing Practice
Solving a problem independently is greatly different than solving a problem with other individuals in an interview situation. There are added stresses such as time pressures, communicating, and interacting with another person, which can create additional stressors for the candidate.
When candidates do not practice for mock interviews, they tend to have anxiety, problems with pacing themselves, and problems expressing themselves correctly. Mock interview practice allows candidates to become comfortable and build confidence in an interview setting.
Disregarding Behavioral and System Design Interviews
There is a lot of buzz in the industry right now about interview styles that focus on how candidates would behave in certain situations. A lot of interviews are also made up of systems design.
Many students tend to spend all of their time preparing for coding interviews and don't spend any time preparing themselves for behavioral or system design interviews.
Companies want to find candidates who can successfully work as a part of a team, communicate effectively, and contribute to a large engineering system.
Conclusion
Failing to successfully complete a coding interview does not denote that an individual does not have adequate technical skills, but that the person was not adequately prepared for the interview. The best candidates demonstrate their knowledge of programming concepts, ability to articulate themselves in a clear manner, ability to quickly adapt to changing environments, ability to debug code, and ability to prepare for an interview. Coding interviews evaluate an individual's technical skills and their thought process; thus, balanced preparation will yield more results than solely increasing the number of solved coding interviews.
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