Not everyone can be good at competitive programming In fact only few people are able to solve those complicated problems with time restriction.
Many people ask that is competitive programming useful to get a job in tech?
The short answer is that it’s not that necessary, but I encourage people to give it a try at least.
It starts with a simple question:
What should I do when I’m stuck in a coding interview?
Most people would suggest you go back and practice more, which can’t be more true.
But I’ll tell you that there are still a lot of things you can do during the interview. You might be nervous and your mind just goes blank, which is quite common when people are stuck.
You thought you did a great job in the interview and it’s almost for sure you’re gonna get the offer, however after few weeks all you got is a rejection email.
Quite honestly you are not alone. Many people are complaining that the interview results are totally different from their expectations and they truly believed that they were treated unfairly. They are keeping asking why I got rejected from a job when I felt I did a good job.
As we are having more and more experienced interviewers in Gainlo, we realized that we can help our users in many ways besides mock interview. That’s why we started our first AMA from experienced interviewers last week, which allows anyone to ask us questions regarding code interview preparation tips and we’ll collect and organize answers from several our most experienced interviews.
Over the past, we received a lot of emails asking us questions regarding software engineer interview preparation and tons of questions have been asked over and over again. So we decided to make our first blog post as an aggregator of all those common questions/pitfalls that our users have.
1. Which data structures I should focus on when I don’t have enough time?
I’d suggest people always focus on those very basic data structures for interview. Data structures like tree, linked list, queue, stack are the most popular topics in programming interview and you will definitely get in trouble if you are caught unfamiliar with any of them. Graph is also important, but just not as popular as the others (this is purely based on experience).
So do spend enough time and be clear and familiar with these fundamental stuffs, and then try to practice with real interview questions about these data structures.