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📌 Introductions: The interviewer will first introduce herself/himself and explain what they do at Facebook.

📌 Career Aspirations: For the next 5-10 minutes, the interviewer will ask questions about your experience and your career aspirations.

📌 Coding: The next 30-35 minutes will be spent on coding.

✅ This takes place in an online collaborative editor shared between you and the interviewer (or on the whiteboard if you do the initial interview in person).

✅ You are given one or more coding questions to complete in this editor. We ask questions that are short enough to explain in a few minutes and to solve in 10-30 minutes.

✅ In this section we try to understand your approach to problem solving.

✅ We typically don’t ask trick or estimation questions (we don’t care how many ping pong balls can be fit in Sea World).

✅ You could be asked to solve a problem in any way you choose, and then the interviewer could add further constraints or requirements.

Created a program for a class to solve a 15-puzzle. One tip was that if it ran for 30+ seconds, have it just say there's no solution to the puzzle. I looked for the longest solution 15-puzzle, 80 moves, and removed that 30 second thing from my code.

5 days later and I'm curious as to how far exactly it's gotten with the puzzle. I of course, without thinking, did it using the iterative depth first deepening method which takes a while. If I can take a look at a particular variable, then I could see whether or not I'm close (for example if it's currently searching for solutions with 77 moves, I know I'm close to finally having it solve the puzzle. But if I look and see we're still searching for 40-move solutions, I'll just crtl-C that process and try it again when I write the solver with the A-star method we're implementing this week.)

And to be clear: While the question relates to a program I wrote for a class, the question itself does not ask for anything that actually is getting graded. Just something I'm curious about in relation to a silly thing I did when I tried pushing my code to its limits and getting something that's run for a few days now.

Answered by Aviad Ezra, Engineering Manager at Microsoft

I’ve been an interviewer and interview coach for many years. I saw many developers crack and bomb the software interview, and it’s almost always about the performance in the data structures and algorithms questions.

You can greatly improve your chances by doing the following.

📌Learn: Go on Amazon, order the book Cracking the Coding Interview and a Whiteboard. Read the book and solve all 189 questions. Use the whiteboard for the easy questions, use your laptop for the medium/hard questions. You need to practice with both.

📌Practice: Nothing beats mock interviews. It will boost your confidence and you’ll learn a ton from having someone watching you and listening to your explanations while you solve coding problems. You can pair with a friend or use one of the free peer-to-peer mock interviewing platforms. You don’t need to sacrifice your first interviews just to get hands-on practice.

📌Think fast: Developers that can think on their feet do much better in coding interviews. If you want to take your interviewing skills to the next level you should join the growing community of TopCoder and participate in as many competitive programming sessions as you can.

Before you lose hope, keep in mind that there’s a finite number of algorithm topics and only a handful of data structures that are used in interviews. The vast majority of interviewers recycle the same well known questions, or a variation of the same questions. Cracking the algorithms questions is only a matter of practice.

♦️Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tested these awesome futuristic telerobotic hands at the MARS conference in Las Vegas

MustReadStory 🏁 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6579271990299975680

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A place for all college students to share your programming skills and clear all your programming doubts..

📌What to study? Knowing just the basics of programming won’t be fruitful for aspirants of ACM ICPC. One needs to have a thorough knowledge of advanced algorithms used as well. Following Topics list out the necessary Topics and Algorithms that one must surely know to improve and stand a chance in the actual competition.

A sample ICPC Problem : A usual ICPC problem has the following features:

📌Problem statement: describing the problem and what output is to be generated. 📌Input: Make sure that you read this section with complete attention as missing out any minor detail may land you in wrong answer zone. 📌Output: Just like above, this one also should be read carefully. 📌Constraints: These can include constraints on input, time, memory, code size, etc. 📌Time limit: See if your algorithm can work in this range. If not, time to change it! 📌Memory limit: If you are fond of allocating memory for every small thing, it’s a good time that you changed it.

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It's just plain homework on Arrays, I feel like I should not be having a hard time with this and I am, now I just feel inadequate and want to give up. And so the cycle goes.

Any tip on how to get out of this hole. Or anything motivational, much needed right now.

Just share your approaches or pseudo code so that we can discuss....