Preparing for SWE interviews (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Zillow, Intuit, Rubrik) coming up in Jan
Hi all, I have scheduled a few tech screen around in mid-January. My prep so far: gone through coding patterns and brushed up all the basics, solved about 50 LC easy and 60 LC medium and 10 LC hard I struggle a lil with LC hard, especially coming up with fully working solution within the 30-45mins! I get through most medium decent enough within ~30mins. One area I extremely struggle with is DP! Tech screen: Amazon(L5), Rubrik, Zillow, Intuit, Microsoft, Google cloud (L4) Would like some advice/suggestions: 1. I have the next two weeks to completely focus on prep. How would you recommend using the next two weeks to amp up my prep efficiently? 2. Which of these companies majorly focus on DP? Is it worth spending all the time on it? 3. What are some good DP resources? Is Grokking DP patterns good and sufficient? 4. Is Grokking system design a sufficient resource for sys design interviews (amazon l5 equivalent)? YOE: 3.5 TC: $130k #engineering #software #swe #leetcode #interview
There is a great course about DP on educative.io
That's the one I was asking about. Is it good? It seemed good from preview.
Yes. I have tried it. It hammers down a general pattern in you. First recursive, then memoize it and later a top down approach. It was a good stepping stone for me, but I had to practice a lot on Leetcode to get a firm grip on DP.
Watch MIT’s lectures on DP they’re free
Yeah I saw those but need to spend that much time to go through the lectures n hence wanted to know if companies actually focus much on DP since I came across some posts saying they don't ask dp anymore.
They can still be asked in interviews, don’t listen to recruiters
What about graphs?
For Google you’re going to have a googlyness round. Which is basically are you a jerk. Prepare the typical behavioral charts with examples that you can quickly use. I’ve seen people fail because they were bragging about being too pushy on their coworkers and seeking it as a good thing.
I'm guessing preparing for Amazon LP should mostly cover that too right? Do you have any good resource for Googlyness prep?
I just went through Amazon PL. Please don’t recite that stuff in a google interview. Above all what google is looking for is team players that are also pragmatic. Quora has some good examples of questions and acceptable answers. Expect the questions to be open ended and of the type “if you had a coworker do X and your project requirements are Y what would you do?” If you have a real life example that probes googlyness use it. If not be a reasonable engineer and you’ll be ok.
Use leetcode explore and do the problems for those companies, read this for DP https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/458695/dynamic-programming-patterns It helps me to think of how to do DP solutions recursively, then memoize and finally use tabulation. This answer for edit distance helps. https://leetcode.com/problems/edit-distance/discuss/159295/Python-solutions-and-intuition
Thank you for sharing. That's actually a pretty good explanation!