How I prepared for coding interviews of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple & Facebook | Complete Guide

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to this video my name is Brienne well and I work as a software engineer at Google in this video I'll be sharing the preparation strategy and resources that I used when I was preparing for my coding in degree stacked Microsoft Amazon Apple Google and Facebook also I will be sharing the timeline in which I tell you that how much time I give to different sections and also help you make your preparation strategy everything that I'll be sharing in this video is my personal experience and this is something which is not just theoretical there is something which is tried and tested and I have followed it myself and after preparing using this strategy I was able to clear the software engineer interviews of Microsoft Amazon Apple and Google so yeah at least it worked for me and I'm sure that if you follow it properly you can also correct the interviews of your dream company just to set some context if you are here for the first time few months back I made a video on my Google interview experience and approved it the same on this YouTube channel if you have not seen it already and you would like to know that how a Google interview process looks like then you can just go ahead and check out that video the link is in the description so in that video I have asked for suggestions for my next video and I've got the following top three suggestions suggestions were around to make videos on how I prepared for my coding interviews for all the five companies that I mentioned earlier how I started competitive programming in college and how in like sharing the interview experiences of other companies the other four apart from Google so I thought that I take it one at a time and this video is going to be about how we prepared for my coding interviews please do let me know in the comment section that what topic should I pick for my next video two important things before I start first thing is that this video is not monetized which means that I am not be making any money out of this video no matter how many views it will get this video is kind of community contribution and I'm doing it so that people can get benefit out of my experience secondly all the images logos and music that I used in this video are royalty-free and the links for the same can be found in the video description and explicitly stating that because I don't want this video to get stuck into copyright issues to get the most out of this video it's very important to understand that what was my goal when I was preparing for the interviews I was having four years of industry experience as a software engineer and that was not the first time that I was giving that I was preparing for the interviews I have done it before once in the final year of my college and again during my first company switch viewers back which means that this is the third time when I was preparing for the interviews also I just wanted to brush up on my angle so many destructure skills so that I can prepare myself to solve coding problems that I haven't encountered before in an interview this is very much required so that I do not just get blank out in an interview so most of the parts of the rest of the video of people who have to brush up on things and who already have a basic understanding of data structures and algorithms if you would like to have a video on if you would like to have a video for beginners on how to start coding just do let me know in the comments so there are three things that you need to start with the preparation number one is strategy number two is resources and third is a timeline so in this video I'll provide you the strategy and the sources and I tell you my timeline of preparation but I know that this video will be watched by a global audience and different people have different timelines so I try to help you make your preparation strategy as per your timeline getting started I mean getting started with the preparation is one of the toughest step in this whole journey and I've seen myself struggling here do this magically happen because of lack of clarity on how to proceed and sometimes because of lack of motivation and I think many of you might relate to this as I was working as a full-time employee I was not getting enough free time to get started with the preparation I need some time calculations and I got to know that I will get only two to three hours on weekdays for the purpose given that I have to go to the office for around eight to nine hours and have to spend time and commute in sleep etc so answer me can I go to the motivation and I decided that you know look okay let's do it - let's start it today I was aware that if I started with something difficult then there are very high chances that I will just stop it again so I thought that I'll start with something easy to just get the momentum so I was working on Java since last four years so I thought that so I thought that this started looking into Java double cushions would be better so another thing that I thought was that I will have a fixed plan of action as there was no syllabus here the cushions are just too many so if I prepare randomly without the plan then I might not be able to do it that efficiently and the third thing was that I I will have a deadline for the task and will follow the red lines and just try not skipping it because the only thing I can do is just to give my try to get the personalized preparation strategy and to get the most out of this video I suggest you to get a pen and paper so that you can make your strategy as I explained mine so I just feel free to pause this video and get a pen and paper so I made the following initial plan for the first one month I thought that I will give initial one week for looking into Java intubations just to set the momentum and revise the basics of java which is also very important and can be a swim interview and in that one week I will also try to come up with a plan that how to use the next three weeks to brush up on algorithm and data structure skills topic voice again you can pause this video and think about you timeline that how much time you want to invest in these and write it on people so here are the different data structures and awards from which are available these are the common and the most used ones and they it doesn't cover all algorithms and data structures so we have arrays arrays includes like 1d arrays 2d arrays which are also called matrices and no multiple dimensions arrays and we then we have linked lists singly linked lists the English circular link lists etc then we have stacks and queues in trees there are different type of priests bus but these three are the most commonly used which are binary tree binary search tree and the heaps and the in graphs we have BFS and BFS as the most used ones and apart from that in algorithm we have dynamic programming we have the quotient and backtracking and here divide and conquer and anything apart from it have put it in advanced data structures set so that if I really get time back I can just go through that so this is how I categorized it if you don't find your favorite data structure here that might mean that once data structure set so now there are two ways to revise this whole thing one is by picking one topic and just get into depth of it for example let's say you choose tack and you did 50 questions on stack and after that you are like Oh km and perfect in this topic in F I can do any questions on stack but that took you around 20 days so the good thing here is that you are very confident on that topic but the bad thing is that it takes a lot of time and the second the second way to revise things are just to pick multiple topics and a few questions from each topic and provides breadth wise the good thing here is that you will be in the same time you will be able to cover multiple topics the bad thing is that you won't cover that you won't cover the topic in that amount of detail so you know you'll always feel that too you know you should do more questions as to fee that you are more confident in that so yeah so the way that I chose was to do a revision breadthwise because I was not having that much of time and I thought that by picking multiple areas and choosing a few questions from each of them should do my work so as you can see here I have I have just marked it using numbers so if you'll see I have 12 numbers here so basically I have 12 sections mark and the e section represent that each topic that I have to do so given that we have 12 topics and I know that I will that I will be spending like 2 or 3 hours birthday on this the math here was that I thought of choosing five to six questions for each topic that will convert to 70 questions around in three weeks which will later come down to three to four questions per day which is just an average just at a fabric of things because there's how I thought so in the end I thought that the I'll just to you know these three to four questions but is something which sounds doable to me and I thought that in the two to three hours that I get that I get each day on the weekday I'll be able to just to go ahead with this three to four questions per day so yeah what you can do is that you can enter your enter the number of questions you want to do for each topic which was five to six in my case and the time limit you want to set which was three weeks in my case and you can get the idea of the number of questions you have to do per day as per your timeline so once you have decided on how many questions to do the next logical step is to choose those questions now coding interview pattern is constantly evolving and so the problem that I asked the best way to get to know about the type of questions asked in the interview is to choose the cushions come recent interview questions I was aware of this as when I was preparing for the interviews I was having four years of industry experience and these years have been on both sides of the table which means that I have given and I've taken interviews as well so I'm sure that choosing the recent questions is a good way to start and now after joining Google and at the time of making this video have taken I have taken around 67 total interviews which includes coding interviews and googliness and leadership booth and out of these 67 60-plus for coding intervals so yeah I still feel that that strategy was a good way to start now there are several websites available to practice these questions I first tell you the resources that I used in my case and then later I tell you some word that I came through that I came to know through from F from my friends and colleagues so I deal the questions from gigs for weeks and each word instead of just telling you about this I thought that I just I thought that it will be better if I can just choose wrong so let me just refresh it so this is a website where you can go the website is geeks or geeks dot dot and in this website they have a specific section for the interview corner and the recent interview experience so if you can actually just see here this is an interview corner section and here you can find the recent interview experiences for a lot of companies so for example if you see you have Amazon Microsoft we have Adobe we have Google also and there are a lot of companies which for which we have the recent interview experiences here so what I did is that because we have a lot of interview experiences for Amazon which is 833 so I thought that I'll just start with recent questions from Amazon interview experiences now when I click Amazon interview experiences here I can see that you know what what is the exact position for which for Vista person is applied for this interview so as you can see these are for SD 1 St 1 SD 2 so I was having four years of industry experience as I said so I thought that interviews for SD 2 is something that I can look for now what I did is that I clicked on this SD to interview experiences just like this we have multiple as you do interview experiences and just click on it and so then when we click on it you a page will open and you see a lot of questions so there are multiple rounds in interviews and each zone will contain some online some coding questions so you can just check the question out and try to put it in the correct bucket for example let's say this is this this question is print notes at the distance key from route so this cushion is of please we can just see that whether this cushion is of a binary tree or binary search tree and you can just put it in the right bucket given that discussion this interview experience is new then this question is something which is last recently to the person so I just collected my questions like this there is an interview questions also the other section this recent interview section is is this so here also you can just go ahead and they'll just find the right interview experience for you and just to write the questions and collect it in the same bucket so yeah so geeks are geeks for the site by which I choose the recent interview question and to choose the top interview questions I had another side which is called lead code so yeah this is the lead code side you can you can type lead koat.com in the in the URL bar and then you can go ahead with explore now in explore you will see a lot of things a lot of cards here but the ones that we are interested in this one top interview questions so now I should see the top interview questions have three category which is have three collections basically which is one is easy when it's medium and one is hard so if we just click on the easy one then you will see that the URL says to top into equations easy and the this the good thing is that it contains so all the questions topic wise which means if you click to array if you take two strings linked list piece then you will find some questions on string which are the top integrations which means that these questions are either one switch which are most commonly asked so now we have two combinations so now we are revising like two combinations of questions when is the most recently asked and one is the most asked so this was the perfect way to get get to know most of the versions now if you want again just click on medium and you will find a different set of questions for this so you can pick some questions from here and again if you are confident confident enough on your room on your lukannon status then you can just go ahead and done with the hard problem so in my case what I did was that I choose the medium collection and I picked all the problem from here and so I picked the questions from medium collection and apart from that whatever questions are left I picked from geeks or geeks recent interview so yeah this is how I do I combine and I got 70 questions that I thought of doing and you can also choose the questions like this so I just also share a few other resources for interview preparation or community programming with you if you'll search over the internet you'll find a lot of other resources available for it I've listed a few of them it's not it's no sense at the complete list and just writing down a few that I've heard or personally used if there is any way to that site or resource left which is not mentioned in just feel free to drop a comment so that people can be aware of it also apart from these websites which is code shift code forces watch a current-carrying capital you bit into the cake and gorilla tea I have also shared one book which is cracking the coding interview this is actually a really nice book and I haven't used it for the preparation right now but I have used it once so you know when I was in college and when I was preparing for my first switch after college this book just this a really nice book is written by Gayle al McDowell who is also the owner of carrier cup and this book contains some nice cushions and if you want you can just go go ahead with with the revision with this book on so the PDF of this book is widely available so you can just go ahead and search it over the infinite and if you want the PDF of the link for the PDF is also available in the description so you can just go ahead and check that out okay the next step after choosing the questions is how to practice solving questions tonight doing the steps that I followed one so allowing questions using pen in paper plus right on code editor for the first first half of the questions which means that they like this is required because in a regular job we use code editors to write code now that code aid this have functionalities like autocomplete or to suggest syntax checking and and much more in most of the interviews you will be given a whiteboard or a sheet of paper to write code and which will not have these functionalities so it's better to practice in an already constrained environment so so that you do not feel this later when you are giving in chi'lan w and the many write code on paper there are no such functionalities available so to verify it and also to verify that whatever code you've written is correct I do need to do this double work of writing it both on paper and then writing around code editor just to make sure that I'm not doing any sin taxing issues I did this for almost half the questions so I chose around 70 questions and I did did the just for around 30 35 questions and after that I was not making any compilation issues with any syntax errors and I also remembered all the syntax so yeah so once I was good so once this is then I was good for the second step which is just to do it on paper because there was no compilation issues also one more thing is just to be sure of the Big O notation that time and space complexities what are the multiple solutions of the problems because you will be writing only one solution but just think about the multiple solutions and the trade-offs between the different data structures that you have to choose to solve the question this is also helpful and this this might be also required in in the interview so this is the continuity plan after one month I was successfully able to do the questions that I decided earlier and now it's time to set the target for the next one month so so my target for the next one month and I said both that the first one was to solve at least 15 phone interview experiences from geeks for geeks so now given that I was gaming like I was gaining some confidence I thought that I'll just choose Amazon SD to interview some geeks or mix as I thought that there are a lot of Amazon interviews available and the Kushans asked in Amazon output and out of a really high bar and practicing these questions will be great for me so also I use the extra time I used to get some extra time on weekends so I thought that too and also do some work around my communication skills because this is actually a very important skill in an interview and also I try to do some mock mock data section and we'll got some interviews towards the end of the month one site like pram pram is a very good site and it also provides a few mocking the visa you can just go ahead and check check that out and also I thought that if I get if I really get some time then I just check out some more advanced data structures in the end so advanced data structures include things like a a bi trees red black trees or B trees of menarche chips and other stuff which are not asked generally in an interview if you're not applying on a very like very specific companies to pastures but they're not they are not asked in very general interviews and this was the final plan the plan for the next one month pretty sorted after practicing for two months and gaining enough confidence I started applying to various companies also I worked on brushing up on my system design part peddler team so because I was having experience or for few years so system design was also one thing that asked to me so yeah I just did that Indian because there is nothing much to revise in that it's it's something that we mostly use while doing the projects so just a brush up is required for it nothing else this was the order in which I applied for the interviews one tricky thing here was that and I applied for face book interviews in the mid of the second month as I was aware for as I was applying for a room or face book office which is outside India and I was aware that the application process will take time test of the offices what in India so the application processes was you know application process was not that long and not that time-consuming so yeah that's pretty much it I have used this same strategy and I was able to get the software engineer job of was strong four of them basically all except Facebook I really hope that till you got some takeaways from this video and that will help you in your upcoming interviews do let me know if you found this video helpful and useful in the comment section and please share this video with the you network so that so that this will help reaching reaching it out to someone who is in need of guidance and also help me choosing the next topic for my video just please comment though that what you would like to see in the next video if you would like to know more about me or my background oh my coding profiles you can just do a google search with a keyword priyanka - ww1 this is my username on all the coding sites that I use terms so yeah these are the coding sites or the lik shushil sites that I have so I just go ahead and check that out so this is Kerry a store google.com which is the website which is the official website for all the openings that Google has so you can just go out on this website and though you can just see that with joy teams or with your areas you want to search for for for example if you want a job in engineering and technology division so you can just go ahead and click there and click see your jobs and then you'll get a lot of filters like filters for the the wrote the name of the role that you want filters for locations degree and stuff so that's it from my side stay healthy and stay safe and I'll see you in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Priyank Goyal

Views: 486,125

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Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020