Big Tech Interview Preparation Course

As promised in week 2, if you have any questions or want to reach out directly, you're welcome to do so! Open an issue on the repo, or email me at: alex.chesser at gmail dot com

Live sessions have ended ... but you can watch them all back on YOUTUBE!

Here's the full playlist of the 13 week journey we went through. Hopefully you'll find value in the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyqig7OzFiY&list=PLCKhabcnmWVcesWZaad7GStYzaV6mUYd2

Please feel free to join us at the Clean Architecture Book Club starting August 9th

preamble

This repo started as a personal project to store all of my algorithm practise tests in one place so I could share them with recruiters and hiring managers to hopefully offset any bad performance under a code interview situation.

I pretty rapidly realized that I could share this a little more widely and build a study group and community around the greuling process I was about to get myself into. A code interview is a lot of work and a super big deal, but the ROI could be as much as 4 to 5 times your current annual salary. I figured I'd pivot to making this a study group.

Full credit where it is due: it was a throwaway line in Maya Bello's youtube video ACE YOUR TECHNICAL INTERVIEW | How to stay motivated while studying for the technical interviews let's take a moment to give full credit to this wonderful woman who gave me my inspiration. Give her a like and subscribe! She is wonderful. I'm sure she'll appreciate it.

about the Instructor

I have been a professional software developer for over 20 years. I've been a Technical Architect in Toronto for the last 10. I've also got a bachelor of education and spent 5 years as a high school teacher. When I started out looking for a comprehensive course on how to pass the FAANG interview I realized that I'd probably rather just build something myself.

There are so many free resources out there that we can just compile them into one place we can build something that has a high probability of delivering the learning outcome of making YOU interview ready.

Defining FAANG+ and FAANGterview

FAANG is an acronym which stands for Facebook-Apple-Amazon-Netflix-Google the + stands for everyone else (microsoft, snap, slack, spotify) we're specifically talking about big-tech engineering firms with a targetted global customer base. They're known for having epic perks, huge salaries and total compensation packages, but they also have some of the hardest and most interesting engineering problems in the world. The prestige and benefits of joining a FAANG are huge.

FANGterview is a legendarily hard technology interview. Five 45 minute sessions without lunch, solving questions like "how many golf balls can you fit into a stadium?" and writing code-problems on a whiteboard. Very high stakes, very high reward. They've got a pretty bad reputation, but I've recently (personally) come round on reframing them and reframing the act of studying for them as being a valuable goal in its own right.

in defense of the FAANGterview

Let's make this very clear. I have not passed a FAANG interview. I've only just recently discovered through self reflection that I've got a lot of anxiety around code interviews. I played the game for about 5 years of pretedning that I had no interest in participating in the cruel and arbitrary world of big-tech interviews. Now that I've looked at the coursework and compared to the salaries they pay vs. what the normal world pays... it makes a lot more sense.

They're not cruel or arbitrary, they're a bar exam. Would you hire a lawyer who said that they're too good for the bar? Would you go to a hospital that said "we don't bother with the a final exam for our medical doctors?"

If top end engineers are being compensated like they're neurosurgeons it seems perfectly reasonable to me that we have to pass a rigorous standard. That, to be clear, is achievable with FAR less effort that 10 years of medical school or articling as a lawyer. Doctors and lawyers take a minimum of 10 years of school and hundreds of thousands of dollars (editor's note: it has come to our attention that both Doogie Howser MD and Suits were both not real, we retract our previous statements on the matter).

If you have to spend a YEAR doing FAANterview prep, you're still at least 9 years ahead of a medical doctor.

ways to use this repository

As a student

There are three main modalities I see for this path.

1. Follow along with me, join the live streams on twitch ask questions, participate in homework assignments.
2. Follow along in the youtube videos taht we upload per week after the livestreams https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1SKRYr2Emfbas-8ZA9GYng these will be delayed, because I have a day job
3. If you've joined later in the series, maybe the course is over all of the materials should be archived and accessible. You can pretend you're doing it live with us!

getting started as a student

In planning the course I found an incredible guide on studying for the big tech code interview. It has an 14 week plan for what topic to study in each week. It'll be hard, it'll be gruelling even. There's nothing to say that you can't do the course twice. Nothing to say that you can't take an extra week. There are no grades, just an exam. Fortunately there are thousands of companies hiring developers so you can have as many re-takes as you want.

I converted that original article into a spreadsheet which you can update one field on and import into a Google calendar. It will set you a weekly reminder of the things that you're going to be learning for the week.

This course is all about you, but a great idea would be to set your first-day-on-course as a TUESDAY because that is the day when I will be live streaming my progress on the course and setting assignments. If you came along I'd love the chance to learn from you and you'll get the chance to ask questions of ME and the other community members who are doing this experience.

Getting started links

Code Interview study guide calendar import tool

Live streaming location: "LGTM: shipit" on twitch

Youtube channel: post livestream video archive

Course Notes and lessons

Week 0 - Self Reflect & Choose a language

Week 1 - Learning Language Details & Professional Development Plan

Week 2 - Underpinning Algorithms and Data Structures

Week 3 - Underpinning Heaps, Tries

Week 4 - Special guest and Sorting

Week 5 - Resources and Algorithm detail

Week 6 - Inspiration and (even more) Algorithm detail

Week 7 - System Design & Live Coding

Week 8 - Algorithm Patterns

Week 9 - System Design

Week 10 - System Design

Week 11 - OS and concurrency

Week 12 - Object-oriented design interviews

Week 13 - Behavioral Interviews

What next?

• Check out Clean Architecture a series of lessons on the content of Robert C Martin's classic book on the topic of system design.