May 21, 2017
Introduction
It is a good habit to do some small topic research and then figure out what to look into. Julia did 4 mock experience today, and then she likes to do some research, the topic is "Can mock make difference?"
Study
Mock interview makes difference.
Things Julia learned through mock experience. Every peer has different talent, different learning style, Julia learns to speak slowly, clearly, make good points, and then present best talent to the peer. And also Julia learns to review the code carefully as a peer, give hints less or more.
1. Use headset to talk, a few people complained about echo sound.
2. Do not be hacker in mock interview. I have to take the hint, follow the hint.
3. Need to work on the attitude. Set up camera properly, and also give people good impression. Practice makes perfect.
4. Julia enjoyed to learn C++, Ruby and Python through mock experience.
5. Julia learns the importance to practice algorithm and data structure. Peers share their insights.
It is the great to learn algorithms through the mock experience. Now Julia is easy to figure out how people get stuck on one algorithm, one specific issue. She can relate her performance to one of peers, and she knows that her next performance level and how great it should be. She can easily relate to one of her peers and then work hard to improve. She can manage her own thoughts and expectation of her own performance realistically.
Learning algorithm is easy to reach a plateau no matter what you take, by learning from practice, a book, a contest, a code review on the stackexchange.com. But learning from the peer, it is like having a coach sometimes, the discussion part is also exciting sometimes.
Met peers from New York, Indiana, country of Ireland, Taiwan. Two new graduates and one experienced "
It is always in day 1".
Recursive Syndrome
Julia experienced two times
recursive syndrome in real experience spanning from 2015 to 2017. She asked herself why, between those 3 years she practiced so many algorithms, why she still failed on the basics, not asking the choice of iterative or recursive, not knowing depth first search (DFS) algorithm can be implemented using recursive intuitively.
She learned through near 30 mock experience, the experience taught her to be super patience.
Last 3 year she only did around 40 mock experience, but 30 of them she did in last 2 months. She first time experience how good she can do to compare with others, if she does not practice at all. To be a learner she has to step out from comfortable zone, meet and talk about algorithms with peers.
Besides algorithm problem solving, there are other traits and characters to help people identify who you are, the way you present, the attitude, if you have high standard for your own code. Have you worked on the basics, coding style, and apply test case in daily programming or not. 30 minutes is a great window for the peer to observe you.
If you are really smart and have a good match with both good performance, then you will find that you two will end up having some time to chat something more interesting, the book you like to recommend, the place you live and sharing of career growth, and other things.
What if
One day Julia will get used to mock experience, and accumulate over 100 times experience; What she will still excite to go for 101?
Before Julia does not care how others are achieved so much, now she knows that people are working hard and keep quiet, and practice again and again until he/ she feels comfortable with the trials.
Julia knows that each company what kind of level programmers are working there and how she should work on to be competitive, catch up.
Specially Julia thought about young graduate from university bachelor or master degree program, without much experience, what makes them so competitive? The top ranking computer science university, the degree, or high performance in the study of university degree?
Learn to play
It is very good topic to study how to work smart with other people. Through mock experience, Julia learns to improve her speaking English.
Julia has to speak slowly, and also get used to share what she learns. She likes to see if the voice training drill can help her, it is not easy to reduce the accent, improve the pronunciation.
The same idea is in James 1:19, "let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak." Just speak slowly.
Actionable Items
Mark 30+ mock interview experience, 40+ mock interview experience, one algorithm 3+ mock interviews, 5+ mock interviews,
30+ mock experience:
40+ mock experience: You start to ask what if you are a professional interviewer, interview more than one thousand people already? What are you looking for through the candidates?
Assuming that you have chance to meet people with the range of performance from top 70% to 30%. But with 40+ mock experience, you may have a surprise with top talent and top performance.
one algorithm the first mock -
one algorithm 1+ mock - you start to pay attention more on algorithm itself, you do not care about the ratings you get, you know that you just worked on the algorithm. You love to learn, that is the reason you like to use the algorithm again and again, see how peer learn and solve the algorithm with/ without your contributions.
one algorithm 3+ mock - You cannot believe how busy you are. After 3+ mock on same algorithm, you look into related algorithms. For example,
Leetcode 33, 153, 189. You reviewed the discussion on leetcode for different opinions.
one algorithm 5+ mock - No matter how busy you are, you will start to look into the algorithm, try to understand various solutions. Big surprise for Julia to learn Leetcode 10 recursion tree related issues.
70+ mock interview experience - Julia met a peer and the peer asked to work on the extended problem since the algorithm is easy and quick recursive function.
Leetcode weekly contest makes difference - Julia learned the performance lesson 5 minutes vs 48 minutes on easy algorithm, so she applied her learning quickly and shortened the time to 5 minutes writing in mock as well in June -
Leetcode 151.
90+ mock interview experience - It is also a good idea to extend the problem for very competitive peer, change the algorithm if you think that peer will accept it. For example, inorder BST successor can be solved using/ without parent node pointer, there is Leetcode algorithm
Inorder Successor. A few of discussions are very detail on how to use DFS search to find the solution.
Always get prepared. Prepare extended question until the peer will fail, then you can measure how deep the strength the peer has.
100+ mock interview experience - It is the first time to learn how to give good advice on hard algorithm Leetcode 10 problem solving, try to explain recursion branches concept. Julia practised over five times Leetcode 10 algorithm.
