How to become a programming rockstar that companies are looking for you

1. Better Programmer
Because, you can never be the best.

2. What do you want to be ?
● Scientist
● Technologist
● Strategist
● Others ?

3. Which Company ?
● Product Vs Service based
● Startups Vs Established
● Research Labs
● Tier1, Tier2, Tier3 and Tierless :)

4. Interview Patterns
● Tier 1
● Tier 2

5. Repertoire
● Basic Mathematics
○ Algebra
■ Polynomials, Equations, Functions, Relations
○ Calculus
■ Limits and Continuity
■ Differentiation and Applications
■ L’ Hopital theorem
○ Basics of Counting
■ Permutations and Combinations
■ Enumerating
■ Recurrence Relations
■ Probability and Expected Values
○ Introductory Number Theory
■ Divisibility
■ GCD, LCM, modular arithmetics
■ Prime numbers, Integer Factorization

6. Repertoire
● Programming Knowledge
○ Operator Precedence
○ Bit Manipulation
○ Pointers
○ Recursion
○ Storage Level Details
○ Best Practices and Patterns
○ Common Coding Mistakes
● Miscellaneous
○ Operating Systems
○ Networking
○ Databases
○ Distributed Sense
○ Trends

7. Suggestions
● Discuss input scenarios and test cases.
● Spend a moment on boundary cases.
● Clearly state assumptions.
● Do not hesitate to give a brute-force suggestion.
● If you are not able to move ahead take more test cases and observe.
● If you still cannot do beyond brute-force, ask the expected time complexity.
● Try to discuss about complexity of your solution before code.

8. Only few please ...
● List, Stack, Queue
● Tree, BST, Heap, Trie
● Graphs: BFS, DFS, Topological Sorting
● Hashing, Searching, Sorting
● Design Strategies: Greedy, DnC, Dynamic Programming, Recursion and Backtracking
●

9. Suggestions
● Ask interviewer if you should do better.
● Null checks.
● No magical constants.
● Write comments if and when needed.
● Dry run without miss.
● Mention invariants, if you have any.
● Try to catch the errors once written.
● Talk about correctness before interviewer asks you.
● If interviewer said there is a better solution, ask politely if he can reveal that.
● Questions at the end of interview ?

10. Prep
● CLRS
● Art of Computer Programming
● Algorithms by Dasgupta
● Steven Skiena

11. Practice
● topcoder.com
● projecteuler.net
● spoj.pl
● codechef.com
● uva.onlinejudge.org
● usaco.org
● leetcode.com/problemset/algorithms
● interviewbit.com
● stackoverflow, geeks4geeks, careercup

12. CV ?
● No hobbies please ...
● No too many personal details.
● Pointers.
● One pager vs booklet.

13. Negotiation
?

14. Thank you
gopi6sigma@gmail.com