Thursday, June 21, 2018

How to perform best onsite on algorithm?

June 21, 2018

Introduction


It is true that I have over 300 interviews last 12 months. But in terms of real one, I understand that I only have one this year. How to push myself hard to come out a solution for those 20 minutes?

Think about scalability


It is wise to follow the hackerrank contest format. Set up time limit to 3 seconds, set up upper bound for those given variables, for example, sort a array in two dimension, I can talk about Rows <= 1000, Cols <= 1000, or given 1000,000 instead of 1000. And then I like to target the time complexity based on Rows * Cols, linear or power of 2, preprocessing time for those number, what is space minimum I need. Calculate one in terms of MB. Usually hackerrank space is limited to 300MB.

Try to guess what is limit? Ask and then figure out possible upper bound of time complexity.

I think that will be good start for an onsite and real top one software company.

I stopped playing hackerrank since November 2017. I totally forget those painful and long hours I have worked to try to gain extra few points to scale the problem. I will give one example here later on.

Get organized


Last few days I tried to get organized and checked in past contests into github, I like to review C# code I write before. And then I notice something missing in my daily practice last 8 months. I focus on soft skills, but I lose the desire to scale the algorithm problem.


Follow up 


March 28, 2019

I like to try the idea to work on algorithm problem solving 90 minutes every day. And I like to see how many problems I can solve in one week.

Another thing is to solve all 24 union join algorithm on Leetcode.com first. I need to push myself to learn and work on algorithm daily.

Another thing I can try to do is to get involved in video creating for the algorithm.

Another thing I can try to push myself is to complete another 100 algorithms before June 6, 2019. I like to celebrate one year Amazon onsite with Leetcode solved problems 470 or 500. I think that hard working is most important part of my life.


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