Seriously, been working as a software developer for 9 years now and never passed a single coding test.
The jobs I got were always the ones giving me weekend projects or just no coding test at all.
I have a job opportunity that looks exciting but they sent me this coding test link and I know I’m gonna fail for sure. Any tips aside from the obvious (practicing in advance on leetcode etc)?
I conducted coding interviews for a few years at a startup before moving to a bigger company where I had a smaller role.
For me, I never cared about if someone got the right answer. I have actually said no to people who got the right answer and yes to people who got the wrong answer (or didn’t finish). The purpose of the interview is to see if I want to work with that person. If someone can write a perfect program, but can’t tell me why it works, that gives me no insight into how they solve problems or if they even know how to solve problems. What I want to hear is their thought process.
First repeat the question, and emphasize the key details. Speak an example input and output of the function so the interviewer (and you!) knows you understand the problem. Then start talking about what kind of algorithms or data structures you might use to solve this problem. Reference other common problems that might be similar, and how they differ. Specify patterns that could be used for this problem or even your comparison problem, and whether or not that will work for this one.
Doing all of these steps with spoken words helps your interviewer understand how you think, and they may give away hints to mistakes in your thought process, or even point out that you are misunderstanding the question entirely. And that’s okay! It’s better to work out the details when speaking about it before writing any code.
Treat the interview like you are solving a problem with a colleage in pair programming. Bounce ideas off them and see what they think. They are very likely to give hints if you talk to them in this way. If you are stuck, tell them! They might be able to reword a part of the question to help you think about the problem in a different way, leading you towards the solution.
AFTER you and the interviewer are both confident that you understand the problem, and you have discussed all the algorithms, data structures, patterns, etc. that you need, maybe spoken through a some pseudocode, or maybe written down a table of example inputs and outputs, only then start coding.