How I Got Good at Coding Interviews

hey guys it's me again and today i want to talk a little about how i got good at my coding interviews when i was preparing for them and how you can prepare for yours as well and i know a lot of people on this channel probably think that i'm a genius from the solution videos but i'm going to show you i'm not a genius and you really don't have to be a genius either now of course we all know that coding interviews today center a lot on algorithms so i'm going to be talking somewhat about that but there's also some clever stuff you can do to prepare what i like to call cheat codes and i'll touch upon that as well first let me give you a quick history lesson about a list of 75 leak code questions so there was a facebook tech lead a couple years ago who compiled this 75 list of questions from apparently a couple hundred or something that they were looking at and they found that these 75 questions were the most helpful they were the most comprehensive they covered the most amount of patterns that you needed to know for a coding interview and this list has become very infamous in the software engineering community and on online forums like if you go on reddit and you know you'll see this list mentioned a lot like you'll see it mentioned in reddit you'll see it mentioned on blind a lot you'll see it mentioned when people ask about which problems should i study and even this list of 170 questions that i posted in a previous video is actually based upon this blind post a lot of things have been created from this one post if you go on leap code there's a dedicated list to these 75 questions and over 12 000 people have viewed it so you know that there's something good about these problems so that sounds easy enough right 75 questions that's it these are really good problems they have everything you need just solve all of them right so of course it's not that easy right some of these problems are extremely difficult word search 2 is just one example try solving this problem on your first try in 30 minutes without having seen the solution before very few people can i like to call this a crackhead problem because if you can solve this problem in 30 minutes in an interview while explaining your solution creating a bug-free solution without having seen this problem before you must be doing some crack or something else to be doing that there's just no way that you could do that so that's the problem right there's only 75 questions but some of them are extremely difficult so then the next thing people do they go to the discuss section this person is really smart they made a really good post about it they tell you all these little details about it right now you can take a look at this and try to learn from it right but some people are just going to go straight to the code try to memorize every semicolon every little detail about the problem there's just no way you can do that at least i wasn't able to so i took a slightly different approach i did solve these 75 questions i did not try to memorize every line of code in every detail this is the workaround that i found instead of memorizing code how about i memorize the patterns right so to sum you use a hash map you keep track of an index something like that right no code this is english right and i didn't even write that much i just wrote one or two sentences for word search two you can take a look at some of the notes that i wrote i don't think it'll be helpful for you it's probably not even helpful for me because i don't even remember what i wrote so and i'm sure you guys probably have similar experiences when you go back to review some of your notes but that's like the idea right don't memorize 30 lines of code you know where if you forget a single semicolon you're screwed try memorizing one or two sentences one or two patterns you know for word search two you can see that i i said oh there's there's a little trick to this problem there's a really clever trick that you can just memorize and you can see that i did similar things as well as i mentioned in previous videos right grouping similar problems together array questions together dynamic programming questions together you'll notice that dynamic probing programming questions use a lot of the same patterns a lot of the same algorithms you know go to tree questions they're actually not as different as you think look at this recursive depth first search recursive first search recursive depth first search right that's what i mean by hey some of these problems are actually really similar to each other now the last thing i'm going to show you if all else fails go to leak code discuss section and go to the interview section the interview questions section and supposedly people share which interviews like what interview questions they got at which company somebody posted what they got in a walmart online assessment uh don't tell anybody i sent you here and i can't really confirm how accurate these are because it is user generated like and of course some of it might be outdated like you can see this is 2019 2019 but you know it's at least a resource that i think a lot of people don't know about at the very least you might know that hey maybe this company focuses on certain data structures like if you go here microsoft online assessment like this is the long list of questions so it might not even be helpful for you because if there's like you know like if there's a thousand questions that they ask knowing that list might not be helpful but it's at the very least a resource that i think you might not have known about so those are the main things that i want to talk about unless i'm forgetting something but if this was helpful please like and subscribe thanks for watching leave any feedback that you'd want i might make more like leak code solution videos i might focus on other things i'm not really sure right now who knows um and yeah thanks for watching

Channel: NeetCode

Views: 38,404

Rating: 4.9822459 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: SVvr3ZjtjI8

Length: 6min 29sec (389 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Dude! I watch your videos. I saw your tip a while back about going off that 170 question list and that was a huge game changer for me.

[u/h1h1h1]

Your videos are awesome and the channel name always makes me laugh when I see it on my subscribed list. Keep up the good work!

[u/3thancr0wn]

Great great content. A gold mine pure wisdom. Please make more content on your experience and thoughts on structure beginner friendly progress and as you also alluded to in your video, more patterns.

[u/jeffzor]

I was skeptical at first as it's difficult to make an all in one video, but this this is a good resource. I was working on the top blind list too. Great solution summary list!