Top Tips for Candidates Preparing for Live Coding Interviews

Appearing for a live coding interview could be an intimidating experience. Everything that you have prepared for culminates into a short window where, if you're able to perform well, you see a promise of going through to the next interview round or a hope of landing the job.

If you're preparing for a live coding interview, here are some tips that will help you prepare for it.

• Practise a lot in your chosen programming language

There's no workaround for hard work especially if your technical skills are being assessed.

Here are some websites where you can practise some of the most common type of coding problems that can be asked in a live coding interview: https://leetcode.com/, https://www.hackerrank.com/auth/signup for developers.

• Get familiar with live coding tools

If you've done a few live coding interviews already, you might be familiar with them. However, here's a list of some of the most common online live-coding interviewing platforms: https://www.codility.com/, https://www.hackerrank.com/, https://coderpad.io/. If you're having an in-person live coding interview, you'll either be coding on a whiteboard or on a laptop with an IDE and depending on the interviewer, you may or may not have access to internet or inbuilt libraries to help you with coding.

• Communicate

Live coding is an opportunity for the interviewer(s) to gauge how you will be in a real life situation in their team when they are working on everyday tasks and coding problems. In addition to assessing your technical skills, the interviewers are also trying to see how you communicate. Do you ask questions to understand the problem better? Do you talk through potential solutions or things that could go wrong? These are some of the things that the interviewer is trying to test you for.

• Good Coding Practices

Live coding interviews are also an opportunity for you to show your strengths as a good engineer. Things like code comments, writing unit tests where applicable, thinking of edge cases and incorporating them as conditions in your code, thinking of readability in code and writing clean code adhering to the coding standards in that particular programming language are some things that the interviewer will see and look at in a positive light when they are making a decision about your candidacy.

• Honesty

Not everyone, even the engineers working in an engineering team are expected to know and remember everything. Its implicit that you have a good foundation and understanding of the basics of the technologies for which you are being interviewed but if you are not able to understand things about a coding problem presented to you or if you are stuck somewhere, be honest about it.

Being candid about things that you don't know and being able to share it and ask for help on time is refreshing. Extra brownie points for being able to incorporate newly understood information into solving the interviewing problem at hand :)