Ex-Googler Interviewing Tips

These tips are for focused around top companies like Google or Facebook, check these out to understand more about the purpose of interviews, and what to make sure you try and do during the interview:

• Your interviewers are trying to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. An interview question is a method in achieving that, it is not necessarily always there to specifically measure your skills on a topic but a tool to understand the depth of your thinking.
• Before the interview starts, ask them what they want to get out of this interview. Good interviewers should already have a plan and a set of expectations. Ask them what you should do. Don’t start coding yet. Ask them you should produce. Discussion, diagrams, pseudo code, code?
• Next, start to breakdown the question. List whatever questions you think it is important to solve this question, ask your edge cases. Get to a point where you are discussing about pros/cons of the solutions. These steps are critical. Don’t just start coding. Have a consensus first.
• Your interviewer will try to give you hints. Don’t ignore them because you are too confident about your solution. This is not a intelligence contest. Also, don’t panic if a hint doesn’t make sense. Ask what interview’s perspective is that they gave that hint.
• Talk, talk, talk as you are doing your thing. Talk about even the most obvious steps. Ask about testing, talk about testing cases if testing discussion is expected. Discuss what you’d fix to iterate your solution if you realized you are missing something.
• Don’t get freaked out if the interviewer jumps to a different question. Sometimes, they think they got enough of what they have been looking for from a question and will do something else. Don’t try to overdo a solution if interviewer think it is good enough.
• Don’t freak out just because your interviewer is taking too many notes. They need to provide evidence to the hiring committee and they want to remember as many signals as possible. Make sure you are clearly communicating your new ideas if you are iterating on the initial ones.
• At any interview regardless it is at Google or not, don’t see your interviewer as someone who has the full authority but some who you are already working with. Try to have a feel how productive it will feel in real life. Remember, interviews shouldn’t be a monologue.

These tips were sourced from this tweet stream and originally authored by @JBD from Google.

Ex-Facebook Interviewing Tips

Check out this post by an ex-Facebook interview on his recommendations for how to interview effectively, to briefly summarize his points:

• Make sure as the person being interviewed to properly lead the interviewer through the solution following a general set of steps.
• Most common mistakes in an interview: 1) Making incorrect assumptions, 2) Not asking questions, 3) Not using the whiteboard to visualize or pseudocode, 4) Not talking out loud to share your thought process, 5) Writing no tests or poor tests
• Important steps to an interview: 1) Ask clarifying questions, 2) Analyze various solutions and tradeoffs, 3) Plan solution with pseudocode, 4) Implement solution, 5) Test
• When you get stuck: 1) Try to match this problem to previous similar problems 2) Align the weakness of a solution to the strength of a data structure, 3) Look for the twist that makes this easier to solve, 4) Don’t be afraid to ask for a hint