How do I go about cracking Big Tech interviews?

Staff Software Engineer at Taro Community3 months ago

I have about 10 years of experience and currently working as a Staff Engineer. Have worked only in small startup companies.

I consistently get above expectations in appraisals as I always display ownership and have been open to pick new skills and have understanding of the product.

Now coming to the issue, I get stuck with DSA questions and somehow not able to come up with intuitions and don't have the practice to solve any algorithmic problem in 40 minutes.

I seemed to have survived in tech with basic curiosity and common sense till this point LOL!

What about me the best way to pick the skills to crack interviews at big tech spending time to cover topics of DSA, LLD, system design and other rounds?

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Discussion

(4 comments)

1
Thoughtful Tarodactyl
•Taro Community
3 months ago
Personally for DSA I'm going through neetcode.io and doing the neetcode all for each of the common categories till I am comfortable with it. I think with DSA you cant cram it, you need consistent prep over months. The core topics I am focusing on is

arrays, linked list, stack, hash map, 2 pointers, sliding windows, trees, graphs
- 1
  Thoughtful Tarodactyl
  •Taro Community
  3 months ago
  For system design Alex Xu's book is the gold standard. I purchased a mock interview on interviewing.io and it was super helpful
- 1
  Thoughtful Tarodactyl
  •Taro Community
  3 months ago
  Also I totally understand with leetcode seeming so hard! It is deeply unintuitive but my advice is to do a bunch of easies in the start till u feel like you can do 1 easy problem in about 5-10 mins.
0
Alex Chiou
•Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
3 months ago
LeetCode is unfortunately just a big grind. The main hurdle is just getting started. After that you need to keep on persisting and have faith in the process - If you do 2 LeetCode easy problems a day for 30 days straight, there's no way things won't start clicking in your brain. I highly recommend checking out the masterclass here: [Masterclass] How To Ace Your Big Tech Interview - Data Structures And Algorithms

Doing mocks is tremendously helpful with DSA as well. Go to the upcoming meetup and see if anybody is down to do recurring mocks with you: Mock Interview Meetup - Data Structures & Algorithms (LeetCode)

You can learn more about Big Tech interviews here: https://www.jointaro.com/course/ace-your-tech-interview-and-get-a-job-as-a-software-engineer/understanding-big-tech-interviews/