[Workshop] Technical Interview Preparation

[illicitonion]

Workshop Request

What is the title of your workshop

Technical Interview Preparation

What are the key topics that will be covered in the workshop?

• Typical structures of technical interviews
• How to approach problems
• Important things to remember/focus on (e.g. asking clarifying questions, explaining what you're thinking, explaining what you're stuck on, clear naming, ...)
• Handling changing constraints, or looking for improvements to your code (a lot of technical interviews take a form "Solve a problem", "Now here's an extra constraint, how does your code handle that?", which is a skill we haven't really given trainees much experience with)
• Worked example question(s), maybe actually asking some in small groups

As a stretch goal, we may want to try to touch on some hand-waving efficiency (e.g. showing two solutions to a problem, one of which memoises to avoid an array traversal inside a loop, or something), and discussing how one solution is "faster" or "uses less memory" than another, but definitely not going as far as trying to formalise this (i.e. no big-O).

What knowledge does the student need before starting?

Given a description of a set of inputs/behaviours/outputs, to be able to write a function to implement the behaviour. Example problems in terms of scope/complexity are:

• Find the longest word in an array of strings, where each string may contain arbitrarily many words
• Compute the longest prefix common to {all,any two} strings in an array
• Parse a string of Roman numerals to decimal
• Write an object which has a method to tell it the winner and loser of a game, and returns a ranking of all known players

In particular, this requires knowledge of:

• All of JS1 (functions, strings, arrays, general datatypes, comparisons, control flow)
• Keeping and mutating state in objects

What are the topics that will not be covered in the workshop?

• Any coding techniques. This workshop covers approaches, and context, but assumes pre-existing knowledge of all relevant techniques in any programming language (and will be delivered assuming JavaScript is the language known).
• "System design" style interviews - though some of the techniques cross-apply, open-ended systems design requires a lot more context than solving relatively narrowly defined coding problems.

Any other notes?

Some discussion happened on https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/syllabus/issues/158 around this, from which this issue spun out. In particular, we should work out how much of methods/object state we want to teach in JS2, and if that amount is little/none, we should work out where we should teach this content.

We should probably perform a survey of what knowledge is required to successfully interview at different companies, to make sure we're covering roughly the range we're targeting.

Completion

When completed the lesson plan, slides and exercises should be added to the Workshop section of the Syllabus

[SallyMcGrath]

This may actually be quite a pressing issue. What would you need to start this?

[illicitonion]

The main things we're lacking are:

• A survey of employers to see what kind of technical interviews they ask, and what their expectations are.
• Working out when we want to teach this, and therefore what knowledge we can assume.

I could start putting together roughly a workshop with the following assumed answers to those questions, which we could then augment/expand when we get better answers:

• Assuming discussing, whiteboarding, or online-code-writing a pure JS problem (i.e. the problem scope doesn't involve UI, frameworks, talking to APIs, etc) without any pairing
• Assuming a decent understanding of all of the content of JS1-3 (which realistically means teaching the workshop at least after the React class, because that's where a lot of the understanding of those modules is solidified)

I'd also suggest that this work would ideally depend on us having solved https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/syllabus/discussions/244 as well as some of the testing work that's underway, but we can develop these things in parallel (or flesh out this workshop once those are done) if we need :)

[ChrisOwen101]

A survey of employers to see what kind of technical interviews they ask, and what their expectations are.

This is something that Barny (ex-Manchester City Coordinator, currently moving to Head of Employability) will be able to help us with

[SallyMcGrath]

If you can start with some assumptions, and list them at the top so it's really clear, I think we can work on getting you some real data at the same time.

After React is exactly where I was thinking too.

@Barny-6

[Barny-6]

Agreed this is a really important area. Hoping to get some hiring managers as advisors to give us some guidance here. As Sally says if you can make a start with some assumptions once I've moved roles I'll get stuck in with collecting some real data!