Interviews can be a stressful experience, especially in the days before the big interview. Many people experience anxiety just days before the interview, which makes it challenging to concentrate and effectively prepare. Numerous things, including the need to perform well, the fear of being rejected, and the uncertainty of the results, can contribute to this anxiety. Whatever the reason, this anxiety can be crippling and make it difficult to conduct yourself professionally during the interview. We’ll look at some techniques in this article for controlling interview anxiety and improving your chances of success. There are many ways that you need to keep a check on when you start preparing for the interviews. From the resume to revising or building some new projects, revising programming problems, and working on your presentational skills, the list goes on and on.
So without mixing up the steps, let us take you through this cheatsheet one step at a time without any further delay.
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Keep practicing coding questions and revising the programming concepts as much as possible
Coding tests are made to evaluate a candidate’s capacity for problem-solving. Candidates can hone their ability to analyze issues, deconstruct them into simpler parts, and come up with solutions by practicing these questions. Many of the coding-related interview questions are variations on—or exact duplicates of—questions that have already been asked. Candidates can get ready for a range of potential interview questions and situations by practicing various coding questions. Candidates must write code under time constraints and under pressure for coding questions. Candidates can improve their coding speed and accuracy by practicing coding questions; this will enable them to write clear, effective code under time constraints. What you can do to practice problems is go on some popular websites that offer practice problems for free like Geeks for Geeks, Interview Bit, Code Chef, Hackerrank, HackerEarth, SPOJ, Leetcode, etc. and filter questions topic and difficulty-wise. You also can filter out questions that were previously asked in different companies using company tags and prepare for the Java test online.
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Focus on System Design problems
In recent years, all product-based companies have been seen to start prioritizing System Design related questions in interviews rather than the traditional Object Oriented Programming based questions. There are very good chances that you will come across a direct question like “Explain the design of the system of Twitter”, and if you have not practiced enough you can get confused about where to start with. There are necessary trade-offs that are made in every system between different components that work together to achieve a common task in optimized resources i.e. Time and Memory. System Design gives you a high-level and low-level picture of how these trade-offs are made and what pros and cons of the system they result in.
This is the reason why it is highly recommended to practice some popular System Design questions. Some of the best resources for System Design problems include YouTubers like Gaurav Sen, and websites like Geeks for Geeks and Interview Bit.
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Learn all Data Structures and Algorithms
There are very high chances of encountering a coding question in an online coding test that is directly based on some specific Data Structure or Algorithm, not knowing which can get you waste time discovering some alternative brute force solution which may not work or may not be efficient enough to pass all the test cases. Therefore it is highly advisable to learn all the Data structures and classic algorithms that frequently appear in coding interviews.
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Time is everything
In a coding interview, time is everything. It can happen quite frequently that you fail to come up with the correct solution in the given time, and there is only one way to reduce its chances and that is simply by practicing more and more questions. As and when you become comfortable with a concept you will be able to identify situations in which you can tweak it around to form the necessary solution. That is why as our first tip, we asked you to practice as many coding questions as possible for you. Practicing coding questions in a timed environment helps you to form the habit of logic-building quickly, reducing the chances of you getting stuck for long with a coding question in an interview assessment.
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Keep a check on the edge cases and test your code for different possible combinations of input before submitting
In coding interviews, edge cases are crucial to take into account because they can highlight potential flaws or mistakes in a solution. Edge cases are inputs that are on the edges or at the extremes of the input space and are frequently disregarded or not thoroughly tested. These situations frequently make a solution’s unexpected behavior, bugs, or inefficiencies obvious. The handling or optimization of edge cases may differ from that of other inputs. By taking into account edge cases, one can spot potential inefficiencies in a solution and improve it to better handle those cases. Edge cases frequently draw attention to corner cases or situations that could undermine the solution. One can make sure the solution is correct in all scenarios by testing edge cases.
Additionally, candidates who take into account edge cases and gracefully handle them show a deep understanding of the issue and the solution in an online coding test. This can make a good impression on the interviewer and distinguish the candidate from other applicants who fail to consider edge cases.
If you want to practice questions that were asked in previous interviews with big tech companies, you can also choose to hop on to Mercer | Mettl. Mercer | Mettl provides a full-proof cloud platform for big tech companies to conduct their customized hiring assessments on. They have the best in class proctoring services available to check the fairness of the exams. Mercer | Mettl offers platforms for different types of assessments like technical interviews, cognitive ability tests, communication skill tests, behavioral skill tests, etc.
