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contents/during-coding-interview.md

@@ -3,15 +3,15 @@ id: during-coding-interview
 title: During the Coding Interview
 ---
 
-Congratulations, you are ready to put your skills into practice! In a real coding interview, you will be given a technical question by the interviewer, write code in a real-time collaborative editor (phone screen) or on a whiteboard (on-site) to solve the problem within 30–45 minutes. This is where the real fun begins!
+Congratulations, you are ready to put your skills into practice! In a real coding interview, you will be given a technical question (or questions) by the interviewer, write code in a real-time collaborative editor (phone screen/virtual on-site) or on a whiteboard (on-site) to solve the problem within 30–45 minutes. This is where the real fun begins!
 
-Your interviewer will be looking out for signals that you fit the requirements of the role and it is up to you to display those signals to them. Initially it may feel weird to be talking while you are coding as most programmers do not have the habit of explaining out loud as they are typing code. However, it is hard for the interviewer to know what you are thinking just by looking at the code that you type. If you communicate your approach to the interviewer before you start coding, you can validate your approach with them and the both of you can agree upon an acceptable approach.
+Your interviewer will be looking out for signals that suggest you fit the requirements of the role and it is up to you to display those signals to them. Initially it may feel weird to be talking while you are coding as most programmers do not have the habit of explaining out loud as they are typing code. However, it is hard for the interviewer to know what you are thinking just by looking at the code that you type. If you communicate your approach to the interviewer before you start coding, you can validate your approach with them and the both of you can agree upon an acceptable approach.
 
 ## Before the interview (remote)
 
 For phone screens/remote interviews, prepare paper and pen/pencil to jot down and visualize stuff. If you are given a question on trees and graphs, it usually helps if you draw out some examples of the data structure given in the question.
 
-Use earphones and make sure you are in a quiet environment. You definitely do not want to be holding a phone in one hand and only be able to type with the other. Try avoiding using speakers because if the echo is bad, communication is harder and repeating of words will just result in loss of valuable time.
+Use earphones and make sure you are in a quiet environment. You definitely do not want to be holding a phone in one hand and only having the other hand to type. Try avoiding using speakers because if the echo is bad, communication is harder and repeating of words will just result in loss of valuable time.
 
 ## Self introduction
 
@@ -49,15 +49,15 @@ Getting stuck during coding interviews is extremely common. But do not worry, th
   - A pattern may emerge
 - Think about how you would solve it without a program
   - You may spot a pattern and come up with a general algorithm for it
-- Recall past questions related to the topic, what similar questions in the past have you encountered and what techniques did you use?
-- Enumerate through the common data structures and whether they can be applied to the question
+- Recall past questions related to the topic, what similar questions in the past have you encountered and what techniques did you use to solve them?
+- Enumerate through the common data structures and whether they can be applied to the question. There really aren't that many - stack, queue, dictionary, heap, graph, etc.
   - Dictionaries/maps are extremely common in making algorithms more efficient
 - Look out for repeated work and determine if you can cache those computations
   - Trade off memory for speed
 
 ## While coding
 
-Write your code with good coding style. Reading code written by others is usually not an enjoyable task. Reading horribly-formatted code by others makes it worse. Your goal is to make your interviewer understand the code you have written so that they can quickly evaluate if your code does what you say it does and whether it solves the given problem. Use clear variable names, avoid single letter names unless they are for iteration. However, if you are coding on a whiteboard, you might not want to use extremely verbose variable names for the sake of reducing the amount you have to write. Abbreviations are usually fine if you explain what it means beforehand.
+Write your code with a neat coding style (consistent indentation, spacing around your operators). Reading code written by others is usually not an enjoyable task. Reading horribly-formatted code by others makes it worse. Your goal is to make your interviewer understand the code you have written so that they can quickly evaluate if your code does what you say it does and whether it solves the given problem. Use clear variable names, avoid single letter names unless they are for iteration. However, if you are coding on a whiteboard, you might not want to use extremely verbose variable names for the sake of reducing the amount you have to write. Abbreviations are usually fine if you explain what it means beforehand.
 
 Always be explaining what you are currently writing/typing to the interviewer. This is not about literally reading out what you are typing to the interviewer. Talk about the section of the code you are currently implementing at a higher level, explain why it is written as such and what it is trying to achieve.
 
@@ -69,10 +69,10 @@ After you have finished coding, do not immediately announce to the interviewer t
 
 Firstly, look through your code from start to finish as if it is the first time you are seeing it, as if it was written by someone else and you are trying to spot bugs in it. That's exactly what your interviewer will be doing. Look through and fix any minor issues you may find.
 
-Next, come up with small test cases and step through the code (not your algorithm!) with those sample input. What interviewers usually do after you have finished coding would be to get you to write tests. It is a huge plus if you write tests for your code even before they prompt you to do so. You should be emulating a debugger when stepping through and jot down or say out the values of the important variables as you step through the lines of code.
+Next, take the initiative to come up with small test cases and step through the code (not your algorithm!) with those sample input. What interviewers usually do after you have finished coding would be to get you to write tests. It is a huge plus if you write tests for your code even **before** they prompt you to do so. You should be emulating a debugger when stepping through and jot down or say out the values of the important variables as you step through the lines of code.
 
 If there are huge duplicated chunks of code in your solution, it would be a good chance to refactor it and demonstrate to the interviewer that you are one who values code quality. Also look out for places where you can do [short-circuit evaluation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-circuit_evaluation).
 
 Lastly, give the time/space complexity of your code and explain why it is such. You can even annotate certain chunks of your code with the various time/space complexities to demonstrate your understanding of your code and the APIs of your chosen programming language. Explain any trade-offs in your current approach vs alternative approaches, possibly in terms of time/space.
 
-If your interviewer is happy with the solution, the interview usually ends here. It is also not uncommon that the interviewer asks you extension questions, such as how you would handle the problem if the whole input is too large to fit into memory, or if the input arrives as a stream. This is a common follow-up question at Google where they care a lot about scale. The answer is usually a divide-and-conquer approach — perform distributed processing of the data and only read certain chunks of the input from disk into memory, write the output back to disk, and combine them later on.
+If your interviewer is happy with the solution, the interview usually ends here. It is also not uncommon that the interviewer asks you extension questions, such as how you would handle the problem if the whole input is too large to fit into memory, or if the input arrives as a stream. This is a common follow-up question at Google where they care a lot about scale. The answer is usually a divide-and-conquer approach — perform distributed processing of the data and only read certain chunks of the input from disk into memory, write the output back to disk, and combine them later on. Being able to solve these extension questions will indicate that you are a strong candidate which will likely lead to a better offer.