October 22nd 2012:
1> Microsoft Interview today: minimal preparation, went horribly. I had read all the do's and dont's during tech interviews and successfully committed all the errors that I had read about in various interview prep books and on blogs.
Errors: Started writing code as soon as the interviewer narrated the question to me because I was so eager to get the question done. Big mistake!
I would have done much better if I had clarified my approach with the interviewer in the beginning.
I was also thrown off by a few things which I couldn't have controlled:
1> I had practiced on a whiteboard for so long thinking I could use one during the interview. But instead the interview was held in a little room with no white board and I was expected to write code on paper with the interviewer sitting across the table. Not a big problem but something I could have done without.
2> The interviewer spent the first 15 minutes of the 30 minute time-slot asking me HR questions about what I did during the various projects on my resume, I have no qualms about this but by the time we actually started I had about half the originally allotted 30 minutes to solve the question. So when the interviewer said 15 minutes left right after narrating the problem, I guess I felt like I had little time, and had to put some code down.
3> Let's get to the question I was asked:
Given a binary tree, print the tree in level order. Such that if the level is even the nodes are printed from right to left else they're printed from left to right.
In retrospect the problem was pretty straightforward and I had the correct approach in the beginning in that I started with an iterative approach but then went into a recursive approach for some reason.
This is where talking through my solution with the interviewer would have helped. I started doing that towards the end of my interview but ran out of time!
1> Microsoft Interview today: minimal preparation, went horribly. I had read all the do's and dont's during tech interviews and successfully committed all the errors that I had read about in various interview prep books and on blogs.
Errors: Started writing code as soon as the interviewer narrated the question to me because I was so eager to get the question done. Big mistake!
I would have done much better if I had clarified my approach with the interviewer in the beginning.
I was also thrown off by a few things which I couldn't have controlled:
1> I had practiced on a whiteboard for so long thinking I could use one during the interview. But instead the interview was held in a little room with no white board and I was expected to write code on paper with the interviewer sitting across the table. Not a big problem but something I could have done without.
2> The interviewer spent the first 15 minutes of the 30 minute time-slot asking me HR questions about what I did during the various projects on my resume, I have no qualms about this but by the time we actually started I had about half the originally allotted 30 minutes to solve the question. So when the interviewer said 15 minutes left right after narrating the problem, I guess I felt like I had little time, and had to put some code down.
3> Let's get to the question I was asked:
Given a binary tree, print the tree in level order. Such that if the level is even the nodes are printed from right to left else they're printed from left to right.
In retrospect the problem was pretty straightforward and I had the correct approach in the beginning in that I started with an iterative approach but then went into a recursive approach for some reason.
This is where talking through my solution with the interviewer would have helped. I started doing that towards the end of my interview but ran out of time!
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