How To Get A Job At Google | The Ultimate Guide To Algorithmic/Coding Interviews

Key Takeaways

should working yep all right now stop all right so we have like an hour and a half so you know what should I call something like hi job to get that good good job all computer science majors want we all want a job at Google or isn't it called the finger something thing yeah how to how to get girls and B how to ace programming interviews all right that's it gonna start it start all right guys what's up we are in my classroom slash University and yeah it's been a while I said hey guys is that like that's what everyone's that's pretty sexist so yeah so if you guys don't know I am a computer science student at the University of Maryland I am in my second year um so yeah I'm a sophomore and I studied computer science that is what I do yeah all right so what I've been doing for the past few months is a big it's basically been interview season if you guys are like college students or if you're like like in the trying to get a job in like CS as a computer engineer software engineer um the interview season is like in in the fall that's fair like the big companies like Google if they do most of their recruitment and stuff and then you also can get a job in spring but it's a little harder like everyone finds their positions for summer internships so that's basically what I've been doing for the past two or three months it's a really long story but the first place that I interviewed at was on a huge campus sponsor I'm not going to say who they are but I remember I failed that interview it was so bad the behavioral went amazing it was amazing it was to behavioral and then the third one was a technical and I absolutely just bombed it they just looked at me they were like you're you're not you you're not you can't do it like you're not gonna be able to do and then after that that's when I just absolutely snapped if you guys are familiar with Lee code that site I just absolutely snapped I just did like 250 Lee code problems I read a book called elements of programming like seven times we're gonna talk about it over there you know show him what's in store we got this yeah we just got this today whiteboards with information we're about to talk about anyway um so yeah so today we're gonna talk about so basically I'm gonna talk in this video about the ultimate guide to getting an internship or not even an internship like passing a technical technical interview I want to do other videos about like the application process and all that craziness it really is like crazy but this video is gonna be about the technical portion and passing that like I started just I couldn't even like traverse a tree I couldn't do the most basic things after passing my first year and that's like what they expect of you and I absolutely fail that interview I failed like three interviews before that big campus sponsor interview and I just decided like I can't do that and then I just decided to go off and just study self-study and then get good so this is going this video is basically going to be what I found and what I think it takes to become I don't want to say exceptional because I don't think I'm exceptional but very very solid you'll go into an interview knowing that you're very ready and you're technically ready to pass whatever they give you so yeah let's get into it so how today's programming interviews so basically in programming interviews for big companies and stuff they are going to ask you data structure and algorithmic questions questions I really test your thinking it's really like debatable like a lot of the questions it's like they're not going to be that useful for like real life if you're like you know traversing you treat yourself you probably won't do that if you're just gonna be doing backend web development or something you're gonna be dealing with abstraction said you don't need to worry about that but maybe maybe you might do that but really like it's it's all about like getting your thinking process and I don't know if there's a better way I don't know if there's another answer and that's kind of why this is what big companies do algorithmic interviews and the goal my goal is to get you guys offers my goal is to teach you what you need to know so that you can walk into an interview confident that you can perform and do what you need like some people really get into it love like solving problems and like just doing these like questions finding the exact upper balance for things and like like there's certain people that love that there's certain people that don't I'm on the kind of in like the middle but like my goal is just the most utilitarian thing for people to get offers this is why people study these questions so that they can work at companies that they love and dream to work out so let's go into the mindsets that you should have going into this and kind of what I discovered along the process of like interviewing and stuff so the key thing is that no one is naturally good and a lot of the times you might get jealous of other skill sets there's some people are just automatically very good at problem-solving minded automatic they just had a good fundamental maybe in high school and it just gave them a good basis for where they are now that's me but um really focus on like your skill sets and how you can improve and and work on what you aren't good at and and just focus on yourself like I don't know I know it's a thing to like compare but that's just one thing to to keep in mind also the luck is a huge part with anything dealing with people and pipelines of talent and humans there's always there's always an inaccuracy and there'll be a level of degree of error there will be very smart people that get rejected there will be some people that are you know okay that get accepted it just it just roll with the punches it just is just something to deal with so school people say that you're going to learn like all the algorithms all the stuff you need to know for it to pass an interview in school I think this is very true you'll learn like sixty seventy percent of the data structures you need but school will not prepare you for a common technical interview it'll give you the fundamental basis you need with how to deal with the data structures in every day case but really what these questions do is they bend and twist your mind to see if you really know what you're talking about and in that case you really need to do these kinds of questions and change your thinking into this way the only portal that an interviewer has into your mind into your brain is your words your your aura that you communicate to them as you interview you can be the smartest person done 300 questions 600 questions if you don't go into the interview and sound like an intelligent well-thought-out well-formed person then all the person has is those 45 minutes to judge you so it's key that you really practice and internalize the idea that you're the interview is offering a portal to your interviewer to assess your technical skill set and is key that you optimize that time and keep that in mind and then finally the solution will happen this is kind of a thing where you can do all I think I did probably 600 700 questions in the past two or three months you can't know every question of all the interviews I did the like six or seven or eight interviews that I did I only probably saw one or two of those questions not the data structures but the questions themselves so it's really important that you don't try to like memorize every question you don't try to see if I hope I'll get a question I know just know the fundamentals and then everything will follow the solution will just happen talk talk about the thought process and your interviewer help you along so those are kind of the mindsets to keep in mind so next moving to the fundamentals so these are the things that your interview will be on that is some in some interviews you might be out system design questions you might be asked how does a restful server work something like that I mean that's possible that's more of an experience thing most of the time it'll be like algorithmic questions for like the bigger companies like Facebook or Google right so we have big oh time and space complexity we'll talk about the gun age notation all of these are going to be topics I'm going to cover exhaustively or I hope to cover at least time given so primitives things like bit shifting that's probably rare you won't see that unless you're like a senior going into a full-time position primitives on your arrays strings length lists stacks queues depth first search breadth first search trees min and Max heaps just heaps in general hash tables searching sorting recursion and backtracking this one's a little more difficult it's something that's not it wasn't covered in my like courses and I kind of had to teach myself how to do backtracking but recursion is a pretty common concept that most are familiar with and the dynamic programming is just one of those things I think you if most people will know what I mean when dynamic programming is like kind of tricky it's a thing where you just have to do a lot of problems and you slowly start understanding it and then graphs and ingredie algorithms so all these are things I'll go into more depth later so when you're solid with all of these things all of these fundamentals then you are ready you can go into an interview and you can find your way through and make things work and allow the interviewer to get an accurate assessment of your intellectual ability which is what this is all about so I think the biggest advice I have going back is for freshmen and sophomores there's these programs that the big companies offer like Google engineer practicum micro explore Facebook University Twitter Academy these like freshman sophomore programs that are kind of not full software engineering internships but kind of like in the middle and these are I would I'm not gonna say easy to get but they're much easier to step into as long as you show all they're looking for is passion and you just need to be decently technically competent to get these internships and then the crazy thing is if you're a sophomore for most of these you can just get a return offer if you do well during the summer you don't even have to go through all this craziness and these two to three months of prep you can just get a return offer and it's literally like a coin this with a friend it's literally Chico getting a return offer after entering through one of these internships it's just getting straight through to a full software engineering internship and you don't have to go through all this craziness so this is just a side note if you're a freshman sophomore this is definitely something you should keep in mind also go to the campus event instead of just going to the career fair where everyone lines up with their resume you want to go to like the actual campus event so that you can talk to a recruit in person because it's ultimately the people who know you that will get you through the door and say vouch for you and say this person is someone we want to interview so moving on this is what I call the Holy Grail the I need new names um but yeah this this is basically the path that I follow to get just a very very sound level of preparation for the technical interview process first of all repacking the coding interview this is a book everyone tells you to read and all the recruiters are like read cracking the coding interview and that introductory email you get do coder bite or whatever that sites called but yeah Crichton could it be it's a great first step it's a great step into learning about interviews but I argue that I don't think cracking the coding interview fully prepares you for a rigorous understanding of like the concepts that you may need for an interview to very good start so after you do that I would say work on your weak spots after I read Konkani coding interview I found my biggest problems were linked lists trees recursion and dynamic programming these were the four biggest things that just tripped me up always I just didn't know how to handle these questions recursion I just did not understand it and then after that what I did was I pulled up each of those in leak code and I started doing the easies I could not do the easiest for a month I could not do them and then after a while you start understanding that you should start getting good at them and then you start doing the mediums and then the mediums become easy after two or three weeks I'm just just paint it doesn't seem like you're going to advance but eventually you start seeing the patterns that start understanding how these data structures work and how different problems can be solved with certain patterns you see em so what I recommend is 100 to 150 lis code mediums I know this is extreme it's just something you like to have to do to get get the memory in your fingers so I did about like 250 lis codes and I did I think every medium in every single league code section except for the big ones like arrays and dynamic programming I only did a few of those so finally I think this is probably the number one thing I would do if you don't do any of these I would say that you should definitely read a book called elements of programming interviews epi yeah I literally read elements of programming probably seven times in the past two or three months it's a little long after the first one or two times but eventually you just know all the questions and all of the ways they're done and then you can just skim in and read over it this is an amazing book it really teaches you the fundamentals and gets your mind so like really grasp the idea why do certain complexities pan out the certain way they do why can this problem be approached this certain way I think epi is much better than kind of encoding interview but it's like in an intermediate level it's not something you can just step into it if you're like getting just getting into it and then I really recommend a website called pram comm it's where you can do live interviews with other software engineers looking to interview and I would take two like two to ten of them I did eight before my first interview and I think it's an amazing site prank comm is an awesome site highly recommended so this covers the skills you need steps one through four and then execution so you can have all the skills that you need but if you if you can't execute if you can't show that window to the interviewer and the first 45 minutes you're interviewing then it's all for nothing so I'll do other videos about actually getting the interview and love the process writing essays making a good resume I'll get into that as well so basically finally like my goal is to equip you with the tools to handle any interview question and pastic the key is not to memorize all the questions the key is not to become a genius and just know every single concept out there the key is to have a solid fundamental grasp of these concepts as a thinking like a computer scientist and approaching these problems in a way that puts efficiency first and always trying to find the best solution that's the key so finally other channels I recommend is to Charleroi I watched every single one of his videos to the end and then hacker Inc not like the hacker in general videos but like the hacker encoding problems they forgot name cranny could even be author I know it's uh oh damn walk my dog yes so they take over every single one of the data structures very well and I think that's also another great resource so those two are great resources as well so yes so that's everything that is the path um these are the fundamentals that we're going to go over and probably the next few months and yeah I guess that's all I don't know how often will do videos I said I'd do the object-oriented thing and I never ended up doing it because I just got really busy I hope this doesn't happen with this but I hope like this video and all the stuff I said helps alright so oh so yeah if these are the kind of liked videos you're gonna see definitely tell me in the comments below I like this was a huge problem for me I just didn't think there were enough resources to teach teach this kind of stuff well especially for the college student and yeah I guess this is it and we'll be back you actually have a nice Thunder waiting are you still recording yeah [Music]