HACKER Q&A
📣 dyingkneepad

Do you maintain/practice your "coding for interviews" skills?


I've never done any coding interview in my life. I was pretty good at algorithms 15 years ago back in the University but I can't remember details or recite exact big-O notations for stuff. I haven't practiced "dynamic programming" skills or memorized solutions to the common forms of tricky problems. All the jobs I landed were because previous coworkers went somewhere and recommended me straight to their managers, so I was able to always bypass HR processes.

I've been on the same job for more than 10 years in a Big Company but sometimes I get contacted by some other Big Company (Google, Apple, etc.), sometimes not by recruiters but by managers owning the reqs directly because I have a very rare set of skills (I'm not a Rock Star, I just happen to work in a field almost nobody else knows anything about, so it's hard to find candidates to fill positions).

I've been telling myself that I should go back to study algorithms and practice those coding challenges so that I could maybe start to answer these recruiters and have any hopes of passing interviews. But life is too short and tiring so I end up spending my evenings away from keyboards.

Do you guys keep maintaining your skills so you can talk to these interviewers? What is the common approach between the HN folks for these things?

I guess I'm in the inertia and trying to find a way out of it.

  👤 dexwiz Accepted Answer ✓
I just ground out about 200 leet code problems out over the course of 3 months and it wasn’t too bad. I reset my expectations that I wouldn’t be able to do hard level ones straight out of the gate. They are just puzzles, and like any set of puzzles, they have their own tricks to solve. Doing some trivial ones to ramp up helped a lot.

My most recent interviewing experience has shifted from hard level problems to mostly medium problems and more “real” applicable problems like a mini excel, LRU, or an undo/redo state system. One recruiter told me they are more looking to screen that you can code with AI than anything else.

Hiring has also shifted to look beyond new grads. Your loyalty and real world skills will outshine any coding interviews.

👤 JohnFen
I don't maintain/practice "coding for interviews" skills. It seems a pointless waste of time to me.

What I actually do is to engage in continuing education, maintaining and expanding my skillset constantly in order to be the best dev I can be. It helps that I'm genuinely interested and would do that even if I didn't develop for a living.

In practice, doing that also helps with coding interviews, but that isn't the point.

👤 taylodl
> I just happen to work in a field almost nobody else knows anything about, so it's hard to find candidates to fill positions

That's a strategy that doesn't come without its downsides, but in the short and medium term it can work very well - and it appears to have for you. If you believe those skills will be needed for the remaining duration of your career and you also believe it will remain a field that "almost nobody else knows anything about", then you don't have much incentive to change your strategy and approach, do you?

I say life is short and it appears you've found your golden ticket, so go enjoy life and don't worry about this nonsense of maintaining your "coding for interviews" skills.