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How to practice for live coding interviews?

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Mid-Level Software Engineer at Delinea2 months ago

I see more and more non-FAANG companies are switching to live coding exercises and not traditional leetcode style questions. I see there aren't any such questions online. Any tips to prepare for those type of questions?

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(3 comments)
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    Software Engineer at Cue Health
    a month ago

    I recently discovered some sample coding questions on the exact platform they use to test you on.

    https://coderpad.io/ has 39 live coding questions. I recommend doing them to built confidence.

    Reach out to me for mocks if you are interested.

  • 0
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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    a month ago

    It's really tough as these questions are inherently non-predictable and asked by non-Big Tech companies. My main advice is simply to write code to practice (side projects, open-source) like I talk about here: https://www.jointaro.com/course/ace-your-tech-interview-and-get-a-job-as-a-software-engineer/practical-coding/

    Of course, you'll want to combo that with talking your recruiter to get as much clarity about the interview as possible: https://www.jointaro.com/course/ace-your-tech-interview-and-get-a-job-as-a-software-engineer/talk-to-your-recruiter/

    On top of building stuff from scratch, there are many other hands-on interview types like debugging, doing a code review, writing automated tests, etc. You really need to get as much information as possible from your recruiter.

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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    a month ago

    One practical tip: find a simple, yet non-trivial, application and build it repeatedly. I'm talking about building it 10+ times, to the point where you know which programs to toggle between in order (e.g. Cursor, website A, terminal, website B).

    For example, when I was interviewing for Android dev roles ~8 years ago, I built a simple application 'Flixster' that let users see a list of currently playing movies and then click into the detail view. It had a network call, core UI components, and certain perf optimizations. I built this same app repeatedly, to the point that I could confidently finish within 30 min.

    Not only did this give me a ton of confidence, but I was able to adapt these practical coding skills into many interviews I had.