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The Job Interview Guide 💼

And English is a Work in Progress ⌛

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GROKKING NOTES

I liked the way Grokking the coding interview organized problems into learnable patterns. However, the course is expensive and the majority of the time the problems are copy-pasted from leetcode. As the explanations on leetcode are usually just as good, the course really boils down to being a glorified curated list of leetcode problems.

So below I made a list of leetcode problems that are as close to grokking problems as possible.

Pattern: Sliding Window

• https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-subarray/ # Close enough
• https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-size-subarray-sum/

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How much prep did you do for the technical interviews?

I get asked this a lot so I thought I'd write it up to share. For context, I was interviewing for staff+ individual contributor roles at tech companies.

Technical Interviews

I was preparing to do some amount of live coding interviews, and some amount of pairing interviews.

Tech setup check-in

My friend Tom offered to do a pairing interview with me, which I also used to check my Zoom / screenshare setup. I screen shared from my 2019 XPS 13 for the pairing, but also had Zoom on an ipad for video/audio. I used Airpods for audio. This setup actually worked great, but it was nice to dial in some of the specifics--mic feedback from dialing in from two places, and just practice my schpiel about explaining what I was doing to the other person. Probably not useful for you unless you too, have Linux problems.

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Interviews Coding Platforms

• Hacker Rank
• Leet Code
• Algo Expert
• Educative.io
• Exponent
• Interviewing.io
• Pramp free mock interviews
• JoinTaro mentorship program
• Advent of Code

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Day 1

• Read How to answer a coding interview.
• Read Using sliding window technique to solve coding interview questions.
• Practice coding Array 1 Two Sum
• Practice coding Array 2 Three Sum
• Practice coding Array 3 Max Consecutive Ones III
• Practice coding Array 4 Maximum Product Subarray

Day 2

• Read Using state machine to solve complex coding interview questions.

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Backend Architectures

Twitter

ror, scala, jetty, erlang, thrift, mongrel, comet server, my-sql, memchached, varnish, kestrel(mq), starling, gizzard, cassandra, hadoop, vertica, munin, nagios, awstats

• Introduce Gizzard of Twitter - 트위터의 새로운 분산 관리 라이브러리 Gizzard를 소개합니다.
• The Architecture Twitter Uses to Deal with 150M Active Users, 300K QPS, a 22 MB/S Firehose, and Send Tweets in Under 5 Seconds
• Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster

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Backend Development

• node.js
  • Installation paths: use one of these techniques to install node and npm without having to sudo.
  • Node.js HOWTO: Install Node+NPM as user (not root) under Unix OSes
  • Felix's Node.js Guide
  • Creating a REST API using Node.js, Express, and MongoDB
  • Node Cellar Sample Application with Backbone.js, Twitter Bootstrap, Node.js, Express, and MongoDB
  • JavaScript Event Loop
• Node.js for PHP programmers

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Security Advisories / Bulletins / vendors Responses linked to Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228)

Errors, typos, something to say ?

• If you want to add a link, comment or send it to me
• Feel free to report any mistake directly below in the comment or in DM on Twitter @SwitHak

Other great resources

• Royce Williams list sorted by vendors responses Royce List
• Very detailed list NCSC-NL
• The list maintained by U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency: CISA List

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Purpose

Bootstrap knowledge of LLMs ASAP. With a bias/focus to GPT.

Avoid being a link dump. Try to provide only valuable well tuned information.

Prelude

Neural network links before starting with transformers.

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Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real