Original Author here. Happy to answer questions about this piece or coding interviews in general!
And eager to receive any feedback.
Thanks for the post!
And eager to receive any feedback.
Thanks for the post!
Ok, time to rethink the email opt-ins.
My first thought: Whoever designed this is super salty for me not wanting to provide my e-mail.
Out of all of the problems in my life, too much e-mail is certainly one of them. I like to keep it to a minimum. And as an adult, a weekly coding problem falls so down far on the priority list compared to all the other e-mail I'd get.
My suggestion would be to have a slightly cheaper tier (probably no more than a hundred bucks). This mirrors the cost of two-to-three interview books. You could add a custom grading or personalized tutoring option for the full 500, or heck, even more (this is sort of like the GRE/GMAT prep option). Come to think of it .. I wonder why the GRE/GMAT prep crowd hasn't tackled programming interviews?
We've been working on some /tech/ to enable tiered pricing in the meantime. The Site's all custom, and so far there's no notion of a "product" yet...just "paid" and "unpaid."
Share your question re: where's Kaplan on this stuff!
As the guy above was suggesting, that data science site does personalized feedback and that justifies the high price. Otherwise, the way it is now, it feels like it should be priced similarly to CTCI.
Imagine if lawyers could be rejected for not being able to explain the minority opinion in Foobar v. Bazquux, which again, has absolutely nothing to do with their expected duties as prosecutor of poor people with small amounts of marijuana.
Imagine if real engineers were asked to build a suspension bridge out of silly putty, table salt, and carbon fiber.
The interviewees are simply doing their jobs, which is to analyze a problem and implement the most cost-effective solution. The interviewers are the ones causing the problem. Granted, it isn't always because they are non-technical people trying to gauge the value of skills they don't understand. A lot of times, it is because the interviewer is a tech person that still can't effectively gauge the value of skills they do understand, and also wants to look clever in front of a stranger, subtly discriminate to preserve "culture", and do the same stuff to others that had been previously done to them in their interviews.
Indeed; this is a point I make over and over. HR departments aren't smart enough to detect ageism being openly practiced right under their noses...
Looks like Kaplan is not going to be interested in these things after the recent shutdown of DBC.
I found the newsletter upsell in the sidebar very distracting. I know you're considered a fool if you fail to bash people over the head with newsletter sign-up requests these days, but maybe just keep the ones interspersed in the text and get rid of the one I have to see all the time? Or I guess AB test it or whatever the cool kids are doing for this stuff. I dunno, but it really detracted from what I otherwise thought was great content.
Best of luck to you!
We're really focused on trying to "twist the knobs" only up to the point right /before/ it starts getting annoying.
Some examples:
The integer overflow part has incorrect binary/decimal conversions all over the place.
The example hash function used (summing elements modulo number of buckets) could be dangerous. I'm not generally a fan of showing bad practice or incorrect examples when teaching, even at an early stage when the student isn't ready for the real deal yet, but if you must then you could warn the reader that it's a simplistic example for demonstration and shouldn't be used in reality. It would not make a good impression if a candidate said they knew about hash tables but then produced that function as an example of hashing.
Similar comments apply to the treatment of big O notation. I understand that your style is to try to avoid being scary and complicated, but big O is useful because it has a specific meaning. Even in the longer explanation, you hardly mention that fundamentally it is about scalability and bounds, and you mention the danger of overlooking the constant factor only briefly right at the end. Also, the casual initial characterisation as being relative to the size of the input sets up traps when dealing with more sophisticated data structures, such as graphs where you often need to refer to the number of nodes and/or edges when specifying complexities.
This has gotten me more interview offers and job offers than I can count, and it really didn't take me all that long to learn.
I hate to promote memorization, but honestly, it works. Some people argue that memorization isn't the same as learning, and it's not. But it definitely helps you learn and increases understanding.
For mock interviews, definitely check out:
- http://www.byte-by-byte.com/practice-coding-interviews/
- http://interviewkickstart.com/ (email 'em to ask about mock interviews over Skype)
I got this recommendation about a year ago and tried. The site stated that I couldn't register, but I could sign up for a place in the registration queue.
So I did that. I have yet to hear back from them. I don't quite understand how people keep recommending them, as if it was possible to use the site.
The diagrams are clear and helpful.
Only nitpick: not sure how somebody who is supposed to learn what an array is by reading this is supposed to already know the meaning of Big O notation. So maybe a little intro to Big O complexity somewhere in there would help as well.
Now this is all my own experience, and others may disagree, so don't necessarily go changing things just on my account!