How to Prepare For a Technical Interview

Most people waste time in their efforts. This article will go through everything you need to read, observe, and do in order to go into your interview with confidence.

This article also assumes that you’ve already landed the interview and are preparing for on-sites, though the advice here is definitely applicable for technical phone screens as well.

So first, a word on timing.

If given a choice, I’d obviously advocate long-term technical preparation- the longer the better. As a general recommendation, roughly 2–3 months to get fully prepared. This lets you get in around 60–120 challenges, which seems to be the amount you need to do to build the algorithmic intuition.

Obviously this depends on work experience, familiarity with computer science fundamentals, and proximity to interviews themselves.

It may take 3–6 months for a new bootcamp grad with zero exposure to data structures and algorithms to get fully ramped. On the other hand, it could take take 1–2 weeks for a low-level Senior Systems Engineer.

Could you pass a whiteboard technical interview from absolute scratch with a month’s prep? Depends on you, but it’s certainly doable — just be sure you’re applying the 80/20 principle and hitting the major themes.

If there’s only a month left, the recommendation would be to do 1–2 problems a day the right way, and perhaps include some light reading. We’ll get to that in how to study individual coding problems.

Many people swear by our daily newsletter and premium challenges to do well in interviews. I’d recommend trying a problem today and seeing if our walkthroughs, code visualizations, and newsletter are helpful in understanding the more complex algorithms.

For those looking for a little less-hand holding, here’s a list of coding interview sites with tons of sample problems:

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