The one where I converted “Multiple Rejections” to “Multiple Offers”

Hello everyone!

This post is dedicated to all those people who are struggling to make a switch at software developer role.

Quick Intro

I am Mohita Parashar, and I have been working in SAP Labs for approximately 3 years now. I would be joining Microsoft in the coming week.

Background

Started my career with a development support role.
When I realised, I spend more time wondering when the fruit basket in front of my desk will be restocked, than doing my work, I knew it was time for a change. 😂
I grabbed a 6 month fellowship opportunity to work on product management and development. I absolutely loved what I did!
So, I changed my team and became a full stack developer. For the past 1 year, I have been a full stack developer @ SAP AI Foundation team.

How I Prepared for my interviews

Mission #1 : The one where I cracked the crooked Coding round

Level beginner

I started giving interviews when I had gone through a fairly good number of coding questions tagged with companies Amazon and Microsoft on Geeksforgeeks .

This list of questions is what I call “Standard Coding Questions”. This list almost covers 90% of the questions that were asked to me in my interviews at multiple companies including Amazon,Walmart, Cisco etc.

How to work this through?
1. Open this link.
2. On the left, you should be able to see Filter and Sorting options.
3. One by one, go through all the questions in the following topic tags. Use the sorting option, to go through the easy questions first, followed by medium and lastly the hard ones.

Binary Trees
Binary Search Trees
Linked List
Stack 
Queue and Deque
Graph
Heap
Backtracking
Dynamic Programming.

4. You should be able to finish this List in 30 - 45 days and Voila ! You’ll be ready to “START” giving the Coding rounds in most companies.

Level Pro

The above list will help you clear the coding rounds of most companies.
But there are some companies, in which you’ll be asked these standard questions, with a twist.
And just going through Geeksforgeeks is not sufficient to solve them in 30 – 40 mins.

So how to work this through ?

Code yourself!

Open up Leetcode . Solve its Algorithms section, topic wise, going easy to hard.

Solve the monthly Leetcode challenge everyday.
Keep a track of all the tricks and algorithms you used and REVISE!

You’ll get better each passing day.

Mission #2 : The one where I demystified the Design round

Level Beginner

Go through the HLDs and LLDs @ Educative.io .

Level Pro

There are amazing videos on youtube. Watch these !

Gaurav Sen
CodeKarle
Tech Dummies
System Design Interviews

Mission #3 : The one where they ask the basics

While most companies will include one/more of these topics in technical rounds as well, some companies have dedicated rounds to test you on —

OOPs 
Multithreading and Concurrency
Computer Science Fundamentals (OS, CN, DBMS)
Language specific Knowledge
Leadership Principles (Amazon)
Architecture of your current project

Geeksforgeeks is a nice resource to prepare most of these.

Mission #4 : The one where I got rejected

Getting rejected is an essential part of the job switching process. I have been rejected by 6 companies straight.

I was rejected when my interviews went bad, I was rejected even when I answered all questions, and I was rejected even when the interviewer said, “Hey this went good!”.

The trick is to get up every time. Learn from your mistakes. Take feedbacks from the interviewers.

Someday everything will make sense! So for now, laugh at the confusions, smile through the tears and keep reminding yourself, everything happens for a reason. 😌

Mission #5: The one where you THINK you know it all now

If you’ve been giving interviews for a while now, you’ll be well versed with all the topics I mentioned above, and you feel you have nothing more to study.

Give mock interviews. There are multiple websites which have this feature, like InterviewBit and Leetcode. Find people who are preparing for the same position as you are, and schedule mock interviews.

All the best!

May the Source be with you !
- My best friend