Introduction
I always like to answer people why I continuously practice mock interview. I believe that I treat it like a research project. I like to find out what I can learn quickly through those practice.
I love to meet people and then have discussion related to the algorithm and data structure. I just treat the mock interview as one of my research projects, things I can work hard and then see if I can make a difference on myself or the peer. Learning and teaching are most interesting things I like to do.
I love to teach algorithm and data structure, I go through those long hours to work with peers on algorithm problem solving. From those experience, I educate myself to be super patient when I meet an algorithm and I need to break through in less than 20 minutes.
My two mock interviews
One thing I did last weekend is to go through the mock interviews from a startup company, and so surprisingly I passed two round of mock interviews, first one is average 2.7, second one is average 2.5.
Life is such a great teacher. One of my friends told me that he did first one 3.2 but second one did not pass passing bar 2.5, which is below 2.0.
So I suddenly find out that I should think about it. Do not take it for granted. At least I should write down and then later on I can tell something from this experience.
Leetcode 301 Algorithm practice
I like to figure out how to improve my practice. Just before the mock interview to work on remove invalid parentheses, I worked on leetcode 301 hard level algorithm continuously from February 3 to February 7 2018, and my goal was to practice over 10 times and also tried various ideas. Here is the list of practice by searching the blog using Leetcode 301.
One thing I like to look into is that I could not recall the tip to remove invalid parentheses. The most simple way to remove invalid parentheses is to remove unmatched close bracket first, and then reverse the string, and then handle the same subproblem.
What I can tell is that the practice does not help right away for the mock interview. I got the average score 2.5, but score of coding is 2.3. I did know that I just practiced the algorithm and got my hands on those ideas one by one, but I could not quickly enough to apply related work to the problem solving right away. The interviewer gave me 5 minutes talk after mock interview, he told me that the first algorithm took me around 30 minutes which should less than 20 - 25 minutes.
What if I did not review the algorithm, and went over all the practices I did over 6 hours.
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