How to Practice for Technical Interview Questions

Five tips I used to get my first software engineering job

“You are given coins of different values and a total amount of money. Write a function to compute the fewest number of coins that you need to make up that amount.”

What code should you write to solve this problem? Or, where would you even start? Google, Amazon, and all of the big software companies use coding challenges like the question above to hire new employees.

It’s ok if you don’t have an answer. I still don’t, and neither do 63% of all programmers who try it (according to Leetcode). What you do need to get hired as a software engineer is a framework to approach these problems with, and enough skill and experience to solve whatever you’re asked in a technical interview. Six months ago I accepted my first job as a full-stack web developer for a Fortune-5 company. In the process, I saw plenty of these types of questions while I spent countless hours training. This article lists five takeaways that will help you crush code challenges for your technical interview.

1. Use a Timer or Stopwatch

Pick the amount of time that you want to give yourself for one problem, and stick with it. You might solve the problem ahead of schedule, you might not — either way, it doesn’t matter if you solve the challenge or not. As soon as your time’s up, stop what you’re doing and move to the next one. I’m serious.

Your goal shouldn’t be a green checkmark or a gold star, leave that pass/fail nonsense in grade school where it belongs. Instead, your goal should be to attain knowledge. How do you do that? By failing and adapting. Over and over again. To accomplish this, you need exposure to lots of different kinds of problems. Quickly.

Back when I started solving coding challenges, I spent 45 minutes to an hour on each one and I…