It might sound weird that, being a good C++ programmer has a small role in passing C++ programming interviews. To be an efficient programmer, you need to be able to solve large, prolonged problems over weeks and months.
However, each question in an interview lasts less than one hour. To do well in an interview you need to be able to solve small problems quickly explaining your concepts clearly.
So, here are the 7 best practices to crack C++ programming interviews.
- Be an enthusiastic candidate
The candidate’s enthusiasm has a huge effect on the interview process. Companies want to recruit candidates who are enthusiastic about their mission. In many companies, this is considered as a technical skill. It makes sense though. An enthusiastic employee would be happier and hard working. This trait cannot be faked.
During the interview, many candidates manage to convince the interviewer that it is their dream job while others fail to do so. The solution is for every candidate to get better at showing their enthusiasm.
However, this is not a permission to lie. Interview is like the process of dating. No one wants to be informed on the first date that they are one option among many, although this is the usual scenario. Similarly, most of the programmers just want a stable job with a good pay grade. But expressing this while the interview is a huge mistake.
- Study common interview ideas
A large portion of interview questions consists of data structures and algorithms. For better or worse, this is the truth. However, you do not need to be an expert, but knowing the following list of algorithms and data structures will help you for most of the interviews.
- Hash tables
- Linked lists
- Breadth-first search, depth-first search
- Quicksort, merge sort
- Binary search
- 2D arrays
- Dynamic arrays
- Binary search trees
- Dynamic programming
- Big-O analysis
Depending on your academic background, this list may look trivial, or may look totally intimidating. That’s exactly the point. These are concepts that are far more common in interviews than they are in C++ programming. “If you’re self-taught or years out of touch and these concepts are not familiar to you, you can do better in interviews only if you study them.” Says experts who provide assignment help Brisbane services.
Even if you do know these things, revising your knowledge will help. An extremely high percentage of interview questions reduce to breadth-first search or the use of a hash table to count unique. You have to be able to write a BFS cold, and you have to understand how a hash table is implemented.
- Try to get help from your interviewer
Interviewers often help candidates. They provide hints, they respond to ideas, and they generally guide the process. But they don’t always help candidates equally. Some clever programmers are able to find significant help, without the interviewer holding it against them. Others are perceived harshly for any hints they are given.
So, you want to be helped. All of this comes down to process and communication. If the interviewer likes your problem-solving process and you communicate well with them, they will not think twice before helping you. You can make this more likely by following a careful process. The steps we recommend are:
- Ask questions to the interviewer
- Talk through a brute-force solution
- Talk through an optimized solution
- Write code
When you are asked any interview question, start by clarifying what the interviewer asked. Try to clarify every ambiguity you can think of. Ask about edge cases.
Bring up specific examples of input and make sure you are correct about the expected output. Ask questions even if you are almost sure that you know the answers.
- Talk about trade-offs
C++ programming interviews are primarily full of programming questions, and that is what we have talked about so far. However, you may also have to face system design questions. Companies seem to prefer these especially for more experienced candidates.
In a system design question, the candidates are asked how he or she would design a complex real-world system. Examples include designing Google Maps, designing a social network, or designing an API for a bank. The first criteria are that answering system design questions demands some specific knowledge.
However, no one will be asked to design google maps while interviewing. But the interviewers expect that you have proper insight into the aspects of such system designs. These questions usually focus on web backend, so you can make a lot of progress by reading about these areas:
- HTTP (at the protocol level)
- Databases (indexes, query planning)
- CDNs
- Caching (LRU cache, Memcached, Redis)
- Load balancers
- Distributed worker systems
You need to have knowledge of these concepts. But more importantly, you need to understand how they fit together in real world scenarios. “The best way to learn this is to read about how other C++ programmers have used the concepts.” says online C++ tutors.
- Highlight the results
Another type of question you may encounter is the experience questions. This is where the interviewer asks you to brief about a programming project that you completed in your university or other organization. The mistake that many engineers make on this question is to talk about a technically interesting side-project.
Many C++ programmers usually talk about implementing a neural network classifier or writing a Twitter grammar bot. These are poor choices because it’s very hard for the interviewer to judge their scope. Many candidates emphasize on simple side projects (sometimes that never actually happened), and the interviewer has no other way to tell if you are doing this.
- Use a dynamic language, but mention C++
It is recommended that you use a dynamic language like Python, Ruby or JavaScript during interviews. Of course, you should use whatever language you know the best. But we find that many people try interviewing in C, C++ or Java, under the notion that these are the best programming languages.
Several classic books on interviewing recommend that programmers mostly choose Java or C++. However, in case of start-ups, we’ve found that this is bad advice. Experts who provide do my python homework service says ”Programmers do better while using dynamic languages.”
- Keep practicing
You can do much better at the interviews by solving model questions. Interviews are most likely to be stressful and stress harms performance. So, the only solution is practice. The more experience you gather on solving C++ programming, the more the interview becomes easier for you.
