These 4 steps should help you to nail a software engineer job

The only Interview-prep advice paper you need

As a software engineer for decades, interviewing 200+ candidates in the past 4 years as a side hustle. I found this:

It’s a path finding+nearest neighbor search problem. only to share it with everyone to make it a fair game.

Let’s jump in.

Step 1 — Study

If you think this post can help you to get a job without any practice enough DSA or knowledge about CS. sorry, no.

Before we move to the next step, pls make sure you have solved enough problems, and be ready to be asked some DFS, or BFS, using graph or tree structure on the spot. especially for MANG companies.

There are enough tutorials(leetcode, project ruler, code chef, hacker rank) for this topic (you can check this post). once you get ready and confident in your technical, we move to the next step.

Step2 -Draw your skill graph

What does it mean? Here is an example of a 1X Python developer.

Basically, draw everything you have learned so far, into a paper.

Step3 — Map it into your experience

ROI your strength, and highlight where you want to talk about more to present your problem-solving/design/coding skills, and put your experience beside the skill.

Here is an example.

The idea is simple. link whatever “achievements” or “improvements” you have listed on your CV to your skillset.

Note: you must be confident with the “greens”. in other words, when the topic comes here, you are ready and happy to explain everything you had done, confidently.

If possible, prepare for the “neighbor topics” as well. e.g. when asked about OOP design patterns, and you have used visitor pattern refactored and improved code. when asked about other patterns, you should be ready to explain.