Giving back - long-term interview preparation strategy - Part 1

I'm back.

Who am I? Check 1. Intro here: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Giving-back---how-I-cleared-L6-System-Design---Part-1-4yufM3RY

This time we're going to some heavy lifting. Sit tight, grab a cup of coffee and read carefully.

So from the intro I referenced above you should already know that I prepared for 6 months to pass pretty much all L6-level interviews. Now in the title I didn't mention the level on purpose. I believe you can tweak this strategy for any level. However keep in mind this strategy was used in practice to prepare and nail L6 interviews.

This is not for you if you want a quick one. This is for people that have months to prepare. So first of all you must be convinced that a successful result is worth the effort here. I won't spend time to convince you it's worth it - to be honest I don't really care. Once you're convinced it's worth it, come and check this out.

Convinced?

Good. Hi. This way please.

This strategy can not live alone. It will be an integral part of your daily life. So we'll talk about that as well. A key contribution I hope to be making is how to interweave long-term preparation in your daily life. I play Sniper Elite 4, I run, I assemble ikea furniture, I have a day job, I watch some Netflix - this will all be part of the strategy. So what I'll be giving here is a kind of life-plan until you make it. I'll take over your weekends too. Run and hide.

Enough of the meta-plan. Let's get to it.

Your life will have 4 units: 1. Health unit; 2. Family unit; 3. Work unit; 4. Discipline/Logistics unit (DL). You can figuratively assign a person to be responsible for the execution there. For example, I put George Patton as the guy responsible for DL and Bernard of Clairvaux as responsible for my work unit.

The interview prep will go into 3. Work unit.

What we'll do is that we'll meticulously script on an hour-level. You'll have to account for every hour you spend. Of course we'll put leisure and relaxing and recharging in there. But every hour of yours will be planned in advance. When you wake up on day D the plan should have been made on day D-x (x>0). So you'll execute on day D like a robot.

One week before starting the actual plan I want you to do something for me. Listen I know you slack at your day job. A little bit, maybe a lot, but you do. Yes yes you do. That casual news check, maybe mindless scrolling, maybe something else - we'll scrape ALL of that and conjure hour-slots from that. So when I ask you how many hours do you need for your day job, you'd better answer truthfully.

There will be three main determinants on how you arrange a given day. How much family time you need, how much day-work time you need, and how much sleep you need. These were my numbers, respectively: 3 (6 on weekends), 5-8 (with ruthless scraping), 8. Worst case this gives me 5 hours per day on workdays and ~10 hours per day on weekends. We're not going to use all of these for interview prep, otherwise you'll fry your brain in two weeks and you'll quit. We'll harmoniously mix this with other activities so you sustain this for a while.

Now we'll get even more concrete. Open this in your browser (preferably desktop):https://bit.ly/2UkWAOw . This is a snapshot similar to what I use. Change it accordingly to your case. Start with tomorrow. How much Family time do you need for tomorrow? How much day-work time? Sleep?

Now that day-work time. Scrape it to death. Work fast and furious in your day job and scrape as many hours as you can. Out of these three: day-work time, family time and sleep time, it's the best one to scrape from. The rest are hardly sustainable. If your family can be understanding, you can scrape some from that as well. Don't touch sleep. Never touch sleep. I don't need you red-eyed thinking about Dijkstra. I want you waking up well rested and ready to rock. I want you sleeping tired and waking up fresh, not sleeping tired and waking up exhausted.

Once you do that, you'll need 45 minutes every other day for a walk. If you don't like walking it can be any exercise which allows you to think while doing it. Then, depending on the day, you'll have between 1 and 3 hours of leisure. Last but not least, you'll spend half an hour per day preparing for the next day. What's left will be interview prep.

---
I recommend the first half of the time you have (e.g. three months for me) you don't mix System Design and Coding in a single day. Make it an SD day or coding day. However, once you get closer to d-day you should start mixing. Why? You need to get used to the context switch as you'll have to do it in one day anyway on d-day.

Now those walks we talked about: while you walk you'll be mentally doing mocks. Yep, there's a reason why they last 45 minutes. That's because they're mock interviews as well. If day N is walk day, on day N-1 you'll have to have decided what kind of mock that will be. If you're uncomfortable with whiteboard coding, you should try pavement mental coding - it's much worse.

As to the ratio of how much of this and how much of that should I put in, that really depends on you and how you feel. Just be honest with yourself and set a proper ratio of SD and Coding. It also depends on the level you're targeting as different levels have different weight on SD vs Coding.

Next up this spreadsheet needs to be reflected on a calendar which will finalize what you do when. The translation to calendar can be daily or every 2-3 days. Just use Google Calendar or something, but *DO* put it on a calendar and always by the time you wake up on day D it should be ready (so plan it on the DL slot of day D-1). You just take out your phone and see what's next, you don't really plan much during the day. There can not be any gap in your calendar. It should look something like this.

Example:
Family time 8am until 8.30.
Day job until 10.
Walk until 10.45.
Shower until 11.00.
SD until 12.00.
Day job until 17.30 (lunch? eat at your desk, snowflake).
Family time until 20.00.
DL until 20.30.
PC relax (Sniper Elite) until 21.30. (Food? eat while sniping, noob).
SD until 23.30.
TV relax until 00.00.
Sleep until 8am.

To wrap up this part I want to say that the biggest value I found in this approach is that it helps you really see that there is a lot of hours in a day if you plan well. It might not look like it, but it becomes clearer when you just write it down. So start with this, and I'll see you in Part 2.

Giving back - how I cleared L6 System Design - Part 1 teamblind

B-System-Public Google Docs