The Best Piece Of Advice I Was Given About Coding Interviews As A Junior Developer And How It Helped Me Land My First Job

The Best Piece Of Advice I Was Given About Coding Interviews As A Junior Developer And How It Helped Me Land My First Job

Ndeye Fatou Diop's photo
Ndeye Fatou Diop
·

2 min read

In 2017, I was failing all my coding interviews.

I wanted to land a job at a high-tech company. So, I would spend hours practicing on LeetCode. Still, I would fail to solve any new problem or, worse, fail at problems I've already solved before.

Until one day, a Google software engineer said to me:

"You can't succeed without first understanding Data Structures & Algorithms."

That day, my whole life changed.

I realized that, indeed, he was right. Since I didn't have a proper CS degree, I wasn't comfortable with data structures like trees, priority queues, or algorithms like DFS (Depth-First Search), BFS (Breadth-First Search), etc.

So I decided to pick up a book: "Introduction to Algorithms, MIT Press" and go through it during my entire holiday break.

This was another AHA moment. After reading this book:

  • I could finally make sense of big O notation

  • I could solve a ton of problems with DFS, BFS,...

  • etc.

I also realized that there were some common patterns for solving problems. Thus, just learning one opened the door to solving multiple challenges.

As a result, I was able to:

  • pass several interviews at companies like Bloomberg, Yelp

  • get a job offer at Pinterest, where I actually had to solve a tree problem 🤣

  • and more importantly, land my current job

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