Interview skills of Hang Seng Electronic School Recruitment Programming

Interview skills of Hang Seng Electronic School Recruitment Programming

When I first started the programming interview, my favorite company ignored me. Looking back on that time now, I find that I was completely unprepared for the interview. Although there have been many blog articles and books about programming interviews, as an interviewer, sitting on the other side of the table, I can still see that many people who come to participate in programming interviews are unprepared or unprepared. That's why I started writing this guide. I just graduated and participated in the interview for the first time. I must really want to have such a guide to guide myself. From now on, I will follow this guide by myself.

Over the years, I have worked in several companies, so my interview skills have been well honed. My participation in the interview process has also taught me what to say, what to prepare and how to interview. In this guide, you will learn about the general situation of the interview, the six steps to success in the interview, and the aspects I consider when I examine the data structure and algorithm. This guide can't guarantee you a job, but it can help you leave a good impression on the interviewer as much as possible.

Disclaimer: The views in this article are entirely from my personal point of view and have nothing to do with my current or former employer.

Interview process

This section outlines the interview process of Silicon Valley companies. This is just an introduction. You can skip it and look back.

In addition to applying for an interview directly, generally speaking, there are two ways to get an interview opportunity: recommended by your current employer or through LinkedIn. Although the former will be faster and more respectful, the latter is probably the way most applicants take. In fact, countless recruiters lie on LinkedIn every day. Their only job is to find and contact employees who may change jobs, so be sure to keep your information up-to-date, contact more, invite others to recognize your skills, and add your skills, personal projects you have done or contributions to open source software to your personal page.

The initial contact is usually by email, and then the recruiter will call you to get a general understanding of your technical background. If your skills meet their requirements, they will arrange a telephone interview, during which you may be asked to program in an online document. Then you will know that this document probably has no function of code completion and syntax highlighting. The telephone interview will last from half an hour to 45 minutes. If you behave well, you will be invited to an on-site interview. Now, if there is no telephone interview, or in addition to the telephone interview, you may have to participate in a small programming project.

On-site interview consists of multiple interviews, and the interview time is 45 minutes to one hour. These interviews will be very similar to telephone interviews, but the questions will be more difficult-but it will compensate for seeing the interviewer in person to some extent. After several weeks of on-site interviews, all the feedback should be read before making a recruitment decision and deciding who not to recruit. If you don't get the offer, you should also understand that the interview is a random process, including luck, so consider it a learning experience. Perhaps you will remember the story of Bourriane Bolton, who failed to interview Facebook and Twitter and later became the co-founder of WhatsApp.

Theoretically, it doesn't matter which programming language you use, unless you are interviewing for a job that needs to be done in a specific language, such as an iPhone developer or a front-end developer. I strongly recommend that you program (and practice interview questions) in the programming language used by the company you are interviewing for.

Six steps to a successful interview

The purpose of programming interview is to determine how high your programming level is. Generally speaking, you need to write a function or method, but sometimes you need to edit the definition of a class or design a series of related code modules. In any case, you should solve the problem in an orderly way and follow the following six steps:

1. First, make sure you understand the interviewer's question. Many questions are deliberately vague or ambiguous. At this time, you can ask the interviewer to clarify the question, so as to ensure that you really answered the interviewer's question. Another advantage of your question is that you can give yourself some time to get your brain moving.

2. Use one or two examples to determine the constraints and requirements of the question (complete this process on the whiteboard during the on-site interview and in the notebook during the telephone interview). Try to cover some special cases with a medium-sized example. If you can think of a table that might be relevant, draw it. In fact, it is helpful to write down anything you think of, because it can provide you with a visual anchor, so that you can return to a certain point at any time when you are stuck or thinking.

To be clear, this may be the most important step. Make the interview as interactive as possible. The interviewer doesn't know what you are thinking, but getting them involved in your thinking process will make her give you some useful tips to prevent you from going in the wrong direction. Your goal is to confirm your answer with the interviewer before you write the code. The clearer and more efficient you think about the answer, the better your immediate feedback will be.

4. Use the following skills to find the answer: Think back to similar problems you encountered, then think about how they were solved, and try different algorithms (divide and conquer algorithm, greedy algorithm, recursion, sorting, etc.). ), break down the problem into smaller manageable problems (so that you can get the corresponding scores), and finally browse the data structure you listed again, because sometimes, as long as you think of the correct data,

When you ask the interviewer questions clearly and explain your answers to her, you can start writing code. Remember, when writing code in a * * * document, you can copy and paste, write comments, and go back to complete skeleton algorithms and functions. But writing code on the whiteboard is different. It requires you to have clear ideas and skills when managing whiteboard space. If you are lucky, you should know exactly what you want to write when you start writing on the upper left corner of the whiteboard, and you should make sure that when you write the answer, it will not block the interviewer's view. Take the time to write the code succinctly and beautifully, because your code will also become part of the interview feedback. When you write code, explain what you are writing loudly, which will make it easier for your interviewer to understand your thoughts.

6. Finally, verify your code with different examples and special situations, and check it line by line. This will show your thinking process, let you check out small mistakes and tell the interviewer that your method is feasible. If you want to get extra points, you can even write down the code of the unit test! Finally, talk to the interviewer about the complexity of your answer in terms of space and time utilization, and then end the whole interview.

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