| > This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic Well sure, but you only have so much time to study for these interviews. So, you make sure you review your basic data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis. The things that will most likely show up. Then you have to consider the more advanced topics. Realistically, you're not going to have an expert-level understanding of all of them. None of them are extremely difficult concepts to understand necessarily, but you need the kind of mastery to understand such a problem quickly and under pressure (since it's a short, timed interview). The most effective way to study, then, is to simply run through a battery of dynamic programming questions and hope you get lucky and the interviewer asks you a variation on one you studied. I've had more than a few AmaGooFaceSoft interviews ask me slight variations on the change counting question. They're really testing my ability to recall the solution to that problem, not any sort of deep understanding of dynamic programming. On the flip side, the interviews I've failed almost always involved some pet topic that I wouldn't dream of studying. I once (no joke, and not THAT long ago) had an interviewer at AmaGooFaceSoft ask me do a bunch of calculus questions involving power series (turn a function into a power series, determine the radius of convergence, etc.). Why would I study that for an interview? |
Considering the payoff (potentially a $40,000 to $100,000 raise on a 40 hour work week), I think that the amount of time to study for these types of interviews is very trivial. Interviewing skills can be used for interviews at many well paying companies because this type of interview has been standardized, so it's not like you're only studying specific knowledge for one company.