Practical guides on acing technical interviews — frameworks, common questions, and how to prepare.
Instead of writing code, you are handed sixty lines that look fine and asked what you would change. It is a different skill from writing, and most candidates have never practised it.
Read more →You spent eleven hours on it. The reviewer will spend fifteen minutes. Everything about how to approach a take-home follows from that gap.
Read more →In a pair round the interviewer is not observing — they are in the session with you. Candidates who treat them as an examiner lose points they never knew were available.
Read more →Solving LeetCode alone and solving it while a stranger watches are two different skills. The second one is what gets graded, and almost nobody practises it.
Read more →Your English is good enough to read specs, review pull requests and argue in Slack. It still falls apart in the first ten minutes of a live interview — for a reason that has almost nothing to do with grammar.
Read more →A HackerRank invitation in your inbox can mean two completely different rounds with opposite strategies. Working out which one you got is the first task.
Read more →CoderPad rounds are graded on the process, not the artefact — and the tool is built so the interviewer can watch that process in detail, including the parts you deleted.
Read more →Preparation ends the moment the call starts. Everything after that is a small number of recurring situations, and each one has a better and a worse response.
Read more →It is the first question in almost every interview and the one people prepare least. Here is a structure that works in 60–90 seconds, with four example answers.
Read more →STAR is the most recommended and most badly used interview technique. The problem is almost always proportion: candidates spend most of the answer on setup.
Read more →Interviewers ask this to see whether you can assess yourself honestly. “I'm a perfectionist” answers the opposite question — it says you won't.
Read more →You cannot prepare 25 answers. You can prepare six stories that cover all 25 — here is the mapping, and what each question is actually testing.
Read more →Most preparation time goes into the round that is easiest to practise and least likely to be the reason you are rejected. Here is a better allocation.
Read more →The interviewer is not curious about your old company. They are checking whether you will one day describe them the way you are about to describe your current employer.
Read more →Answer too early and you cap yourself. Refuse and you look difficult. Here is the sequence that keeps the number open without being evasive.
Read more →Most candidates fail the system design round not for lack of knowledge, but for lack of structure. Here is a repeatable framework, six questions that come up again and again, and the traps to avoid.
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