[agentultra]

A good number of people conducting interviews are never given any formal training. They may be biased against you before you even enter the room. Fortunately the demand for programmers is still good so take feedback from the interview process with a grain of salt.

There are great websites where you can practice technical interview questions. Leetcode, etc. When I'm getting ready for interviews I keep a practice journal and build a deck of flashcards. I use the practice journal to categorize the problems I work on, how long it took me, how many times I've practiced that problem, notes on my solutions, etc. I try to cover the 5 most common solution types: _depth first search_, _breadth first search_, _binary search_, _two pointers_, and _dynamic programming_. Review the most common data structures and their look up times. And I use the flashcards to test my reading comprehension: I put the problem description on the card and the answer is which algorithm should be used to solve it.

This gets me through 90% of interview exercises. Occasionally you get hit with a smart aleck who will try to blind-side you with an optimization problem after a hard dynamic algorithm. It's good to have some breadth in your knowledge of special data structures like heaps, k-d trees, and the like but I wouldn't waste too much time on them unless you know ahead of time that the company you really, really want to work for is likely to ask these sorts of questions. I try to book those companies for the end of a round so that I have time to warm up before I get to the ones I really want (and need to practice harder for).