Algorithm and friendship through mock interview

January 13, 2018

Introduction

Life is so busy and we have so many problems to work on. I have to work on my sponsor application project, I like to talk to my nephew for his principle application, but he does not want to take my phone call or wechat. I have to learn so many things, go to swimming, take some pluralsight.com courses, and work on other things like my mortgage loan search, and other things like going out and enjoying the friendship etc.

I spent this Saturday with most of time to practice mock interview. Starting from 10:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 4:00 PM. Before it is so rare that I can meet one person who talked to me about algorithm and data structure, it only happened twice or thrice from 2010 to 2015. One hour a year from Microsoft employee. But since last March 2017, after I started to practice mock interview, I gained confidence to meet a programmer a day, I had so much experience to work with different programmers, from senior developer, leaders, managers, graduate student and undergraduate students. Every hour a time, I have met over 150 programmers over last 10 months.

Indian 

Through mock interview, I have worked with more than twenty Indian students or programmers now. I am pretty sure that it is very easy to work with Indians. Definitely I can get along and I can work with them easily.

I could not believe that I have learned so many things from Indian. Before March 2017, I never had chance to sit down with an Indian to talk over an hour. But now I have learned so many things through mock interview those 20 + hours.

Chinese

Now it is so easy to get connected to Chinese. I have met so many graduate students in USA and Canada. I almost interviewed over ten top 100 ranking university students.

Today it is the first time I met a Chinese who likes to talk to me over one hour and 45 minutes, also works full time in a startup in California. I asked the extra algorithm for him to solve, and then he found that the problem was so interesting. I kept telling him that I will not give any hint. But he solved the problem pretty quickly.

We do discuss some math problem, how to define the possible brute force solution for maximum number of chunks. I argued that the first chunk starts from index = 0, one option only. But the end index of first chunk can be 0, 1, 2, to N - 1, N options. So brute force gives N options first chunk. We at most have N chunks, so brute force solution's time complexity is O(N * N). This gives the peer hint and he quickly came out the solution.

Startup, Microsoft and Googler

It is not big surprise for me to meet a peer on mock interview platform who works for Microsoft and has Google onsite interview experience today, I learn how other people work and how good people are to solve algorithm and data structure problems. I have met more than five Microsoft employees since last December.

Through mock interview practice, I learn how to connect to people and also learn from each of them.