AlgoExpert Review (How I Got My Google Offer)

what up guys if you're new here i'm jake and i'm willing to bet you've seen this before so you want to be a software engineer at google but for once in my life an advertisement actually lived up to the expectation because i got algo expert and then a google offer but the question is how much did i go expert help and should you get it if you want a fang job well to start off regardless of what you use studying is going to be necessary for your job interviews you'll need to brush up on your whiteboarding skills and get ready to answer some technical and personal questions i'll go expert like other products makes this whole process more approachable by bundling study materials together the time and expertise put into curating this bundle of study materials is what you're paying for when you purchase algo expert so here's the tl dr if you have interviews coming up in 80 burning a hole in your pocket buy it now that doesn't mean i like everything and we'll be exploring the product in depth a little bit later in this video but first let's go back and talk about my personal journey from algo expert to my google offer letter so it's a normal day i'm watching youtube videos at my desk is it my lunch is it my break who knows i get an email from a google recruiter saying that there's an opening and my resume is a fit pretty standard stuff but i emailed back and set up a phone call out of what i can only call morbid curiosity i explained my bootcamp background and how we didn't necessarily study algorithms or data structures as compared to someone with a cs degree and they basically told me that i can go through the interview process like everyone else or go pound sand i don't know why but i chose to do it anyway now a sensible person would put a difficult interview a month out or so i decided to schedule it two weeks after the phone call the reason being they said over the phone they wanted to hire a lot of people over the summer so the sooner the better in my mind i didn't really process how difficult i made things for myself until i hung up the phone and started going through the provided study material they sent over the farther i got into the list the more nervous i got so with just two weeks between me and an intensive technical interview i drove to my personal office and drew up a plan the first thing i did was separate my studies into different sections like system design algorithms and data structures and assign each subject to a day of the week with a schedule set up all i had to do was gather materials to work through each day google was really helpful here and provided a lot of links to articles and materials i could use to study the basic takeaway though was brush up on whiteboard problems and brush up on cs basics now i had used leak code in code wars before but i recently saw a commercial for algo expert and liked it it emphasized a limited problem set especially with my time constraint i wanted to confirm that i was working through practice problems that were relevant for my upcoming interview so i went ahead and purchased algoexpert and integrated it into my algorithms and data structure study as for the book everybody was saying oh read cracking the coding interview read cracking no i went with the algorithm design manual by skiana this monster is basically a 600 page college textbook i don't know how but i made it through about 400 pages in two weeks though going into my first interview i definitely felt unprepared and nervous but i told myself that it was going to be a learning experience and even if i failed it wasn't that big of a deal because i was doing my best and it went pretty much how i expected there were some problems i did while on and some that i didn't do so well on realistically i didn't expect to get a call back so i get a phone call from the recruiter two days later they say well we've got some bad news we thought you underperformed on two of the interviews and we can't move forward with the hiring committee unless you come back for two more interviews i was shocked but i jumped on the opportunity and scheduled the follow-up interviews for the next week this time i knew what to expect i spent more time on algo expert and focused on not overthinking the problem which is what derailed my previous interviews and a week later i came in and crushed my follow-ups the last stop of this adventure was team match even after all of my success if i couldn't match with the team all of it was for nothing luckily my interpersonal skills are pretty good so i gotta offer before my first team match interview even ended looking back i owe a lot of my success to careful preparation and luck you can have all the time in the world to prep for an interview but if you use it improperly or study the wrong materials you're not going to get anywhere following that let's go through algo expert and look at the tools and talk about how i use them from beginning to end the data structures crash course is a video series that is meant to refresh you on cs basics i learned a lot from this and then i learned even more from the algorithm's design manual after having gone through both my recommendation is to start with a book if this material is completely new to you but if you already have a cs degree this is a perfectly high level refresher series to go through next are the practice problems at the time of recording there are 160 separated into four difficulties in several categories the key components of the practice problems are the prompt the scratch pad the code editor the testing window and the provided solutions one of the best things about the practice problems and algo expert itself is the provided solutions and video explanations i cannot stress this enough having a consistent narrator do walk-throughs and provide code solutions makes a huge difference as you work through problems that are difficult and new to you their naming conventions and coding standards become very familiar and following along with their logic becomes extremely easy one thing i am critical about when it comes to this practice style is the emphasis on compiling running and testing your code the reality is that most interviews will be conducted on a whiteboard or blank text editor i wasn't allowed to run or test any of my code in my interviews and in some cases my interviewer actually allowed me to skip implementing whole data structures to move the interview along faster the real emphasis of the interview is showing you conceptually understand how to approach the problem and are able to write out a solution that seems viable so when it comes to this i say avoid spinning your wheels and running your code 100 times to try and fix an edge case scenario just skip to the video explanation last feature i spent time on was the mock interviews not much to say here everything worked as expected and i got some cool new friends to add on my linkedin whatever platform you use make sure you do a lot of mock interviews to get comfortable in a real interview setting and if you know of any job openings there are some really talented people looking for jobs i met through this platform and i've put their linkedin profiles in the video description now believe it or not there are other platforms that provide similar services so let's take a look at a couple leak code is a popular site that offers coding questions mock interviews and a bunch of other bells and whistles there are more than 1800 practice problems and you can see other people's solutions as well as share your own they also offer a paid service that adds more features like company relevant problem collections interview formats custom boiler plates autocomplete on and on and on and on and on what i like about leak code is its large problem pool user interface and community the strength of a platform like this in my opinion is its focus on offering you a way to approach a problem and then iterate on the solution with other people to sharpen it into an even better solution another resource is the google tech dev guide it's a free curated collection of interview questions videos and articles that can help walk you through cs basics to interview prep this seems to be a lesser known resource even my interviewers at google have never heard of it one thing to note here is that while your resources are somewhat organized there's no set path this is more like a content repository for you to pull from if you already have an idea of what to study the tech dev guide strength is that it focuses on a particular goal which is prepped for google interviews while it doesn't have an obvious road map of how you should work through it it's still a very helpful supplementary resource for anyone with upcoming fang interviews especially google look when it comes to interview prep just like most things in computer science you can do it for free if you want if you're struggling with money or can't justify an 80 purchase you shouldn't feel bad about using free services but when it comes to algo expert the best value is the problem selection and video walkthroughs if you have an upcoming fang interview and you need to be absolutely sure you're working through relevant practice problems you can be reasonably sure you're using your time well on algo expert additionally if you like clement's content and his teaching style you're going to be able to move through these problems a lot faster than if you were just youtubing every leak code problem you got stuck on it really comes down to problem selection and having a mentor you understand well so check out his channel try one of the free questions on algoexpert.com and watch the video walkthrough i know he has a lisp you'll get over it you

Channel: Jake Marquez

Views: 8,900

Rating: 4.8791947 out of 5

Keywords: AlgoExpert, Interview, Review, Google, Offer, Software, Engineer, Software Engineer, Algo, Expert

Id: z0-sDd_d6Uo

Length: 9min 6sec (546 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021