Comment by trevorcreech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trevorcreech | Hacker News Reader

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I was in a similar situation 3 years ago. Like other people said, I'd focus on growth-stage startups (Stripe, Checkr, Airbnb, Opendoor, etc). I found their interviews more practical and approachable than Facebook, Google, etc. Most of the places I interviewed had me writing and running real code on my own computer.

I spent about a month prepping with:

* Cracking the Coding Interview

* https://www.interviewcake.com: curated set of ~50 questions with excellent step-by-step hints that don't immediately spoil the whole problem. Well worth the $250 — I didn't do any Leetcode-style problems aside from these.

* https://interviewing.io: Real, anonymous phone screens. This was amazing for me because I hadn't done a technical interview in 4 years and going through a real interview with a real person is totally different than practice problems.

Companies in SF will cover your costs to interview and usually will give you a relocation bonus as well, so don't discount moving down here :)

FYI, interviewing.io has its own tech screen performed by codility.com. One of their questions could be likened to a novel, and by the time I read through what computations I would need to perform to alleviate the protagonist's issues, the time was nearly up.

As someone without a CS degree, I want to second how good Interview Cake. It probably depends upon how you like to learn, but I found the interactive style of the site "clicked" with me. The UI is great, and the organization of the materials is also very clean. I found it friendlier & easier to work with than Cracking the Coding Interview.

I also got lucky -- the question for my phone tech screen at the company I wound up accepting an offer from was almost identical to one of the Interview Cake questions I'd worked.

I paid for whatever the shortest term membership was in the weeks I was preparing for interviews, and it was worth it.

OOC, does anyone know of a list of growth stage/fast growing companies out there? I feel like I remember seeing something like this a couple years ago but can't remember what it was called

I think you're looking for https://breakoutlist.com/

Sounds like great resources, thanks.

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