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Playing The Code Interview Game - Day 1 - The Plan for a Plan!

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Introduction

I was talking yesterday to a friend of mine and he is looking for a new job.  I stressed out to him that looking for a new job in high tech industry should be highly treated as series s**t business.  It involves making a plan, reviewing computer science academy basic algorithms, fine tuning your resume, and practicing logical questions and programming questions.

Now although this is a serious game, we at, developers at rest, think that developers should rest, therefore an inherent part of our plan, is not to work your brain out and to take the time also to rest.

This series will go through these steps, you can actually take it to be your plan, we are going to have a timeline, so that we are going to mention how much time you need to invest every day and in what.



Usually web sites that focus on hacking programming tend to focus on one or only a few aspects of that area, we are going to get a holistic picture of the process, and when we feel it's time to invest money in something we will mention this.  Don't take this as an advertisement, it's going to be an investment.

Step 1: The Plan for a Plan

In this step we are going to cover what our plan for a plan is going to be and here it is:
  1. List computer science algorithms and data structures topics to study
  2. Aggregate the topics in a google spreadsheet
  3. Make a schedule to study them first theoretically
  4. List timeline to practice each and every one of them
  5. List books or hopefully single book to get problem set from
  6. List web site or hopefully the one and best web site to practice programming tasks
  7. Schedule exercises
  8. List companies to do dry-run interviews on (companies you are less interested in)
  9. List companies you are interested in and after you finished the try run go to these interviews
  10. Tactic for negotiation
If you have other topics you would like to mention please do comment on this topic below in comments section.  Note that we are going to incorporate rest pieces and fun in the details of the steps that we are going to provide in future posts.

Summary

With this developers at rest conclude our plan for a plan for programming interviews.  In the next post we are going to go through step number 1 which is to list computer science algorithms and data structures topics to study.  Follow us there and leave a comment if you have any question or issue!

Book

Now by far the best book (although I think I could have created a better version) for studying for programing interviews is: "Cracking The Coding Interview"

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