What is the best way to prepare for technical tests?

[BarryCranford]

I'm keen to hear our mentors thoughts on the best way a student can prepare for technical tests they will face at interviews.

Personally as a Recruiter, we generally find that Developers (whether junior or senior) always follow a similar pattern. Most fail their first few technical interviews and then get in the habit of the things they have to do to pass tech tests.

One piece of advice I would always offer is do not use job interviews and applications as practice. Practice as much as possible in advance, find small problems online to solve e.g. codility or project euler. Look at one problem at a time, solve it within a time limit. Each puzzle you solve, go back and refactor your original answer as much as you can. See if you can work out where you went wrong initially and try to get an idea of the best way to approach these puzzles.

I'd like to throw this questions out to our mentors and see what their thoughts are?

- What advice would you offer on how to prepare for technical tests?

Barry

[Richard Conroy]

Offline practice using resources such as Project Euler, the Ruby Quiz, Code Katas and the like, trains your 'coding fitness'.

It is useful in general, it helps with interview stage fright, and buries common idioms in muscle memory so that you don't get stuck writing it in a test.

As a side effect, you can use these exercises as a way to fill a GitHub profile - there are a number of people who do work through these exercises in a transparent manner (allowing others to see how they solved it).

[Samir Talwar]

For Google-like interviews, I recommend TopCoder. Google and companies like it are incredibly algorithm-heavy, and the only way to get through them is to practice. TopCoder is great for honing your algorithm and data structures skills.

Things get a bit more nuanced when you venture into Shoreditch. Most people around there value algorithms, but also clean and maintainable code, and it's hard to teach that except through experience. Web sites like http://codereview.stackexchange.com/ and http://refactormycode.com/ (currently down for maintenance) are excellent, but you can't really post up homework there. I would encourage students to work on pet projects and ask the communities there and on this mailing list for guidance towards clean code.

— Samir.

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[Savvas Shazam]

I totally agree with the GitHub idea. It also helps the interviewer get a better feel for the candidate without having to give him additional tasks. For example, we recently interviewed a candidate that had FizzBuzz on his GitHub which was a nice bonus for us since we gave him a different test.

One note about that though. The exercise repos should have history of commits on them so that the interviewer can see the thought process. Seeing one commit with the whole problem solved might lead people to believe it was a copy paste.

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[Steve Souza]

• For google interviews you must know data structures well (graphs, lists, maps,...) and designing at scale.  
• For interviews with Goofle you will code in google docs, which can be very disconcerting if you are not used to it (no code completion, color coding and other things that will suprisingly throw you off if you don't have experience coding without an IDE, or lack of familiarity with google docs).
  
• For the big companies such as amazon, google, facebook, microsoft and ebay this is a good reference and has lots of practice questions and also a website that has even more:  www.careercup.com
• http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming-Questions/dp/098478280X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382353197&sr=8-1&keywords=coding+interview  

[Stephen Lake]

I find that for standard Java tests for a java engineer with some experience is useful: 

• Java Concurrency in Practice
  
• Oracle Certified Java Programmer
  
• Effective Java
  

Regards

Steve.

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[Barry Cranford]

A few people have mentioned keeping their code on GitHub as a good solution to preparing for technical tests.

For any student/graduate that is not aware of what GitHub is or why it's important, check out this 10 minute podcast in which our very own Sam Hepburn (@shrecworks) caught up with GitHub's international evangelist when he was in London. Sam asks Tim what GitHub is all about and what it is important for students: http://blog.recworks.co.uk/tim-berglund-trainer-evangelist-at-github/

Cheers,
Barry
@bcrecworks

[Phil Haigh]

I agree with everything said so far, but I still have a few suggestions of my own.

First of all I'm inclined to say that for practice, stick to abstract problem solving. I know some companies (Sky, for example) are wont to present a business-relevant scenario when doing technical tests but you can't possibly try and anticipate what a particular employer might do - so don't worry about that.

When you find yourself presented with a 'code at home' test, by all means have a look around the web but don't be tempted to download and submit somebody else's solution. Yes, I've seen it done.

In terms of resources I have two specific suggestions that I've not seen mentioned: 

Google Code Jam (https://code.google.com/codejam/) have a practice area where you can access all of their previous challenges.

99 Scala Problems (http://aperiodic.net/phil/scala/s-99/) is aimed at Scala but the problems can be attacked in Java too.

Finally, if it hasn't been repeated enough already, do all your preparation in the way you'd expect to do it at interview - test driven, and from scratch. Make sure you can start from a brand new, empty project (or pom.xml), add your testing dependencies and write some code. Make a point of being able to do this in both Eclipse and IntelliJ. Most companies, in my experience, tend to use Eclipse because it is free, but some companies do use IntelliJ (and of course the community edition is free).

Phil.

Phil Haigh

Surfsoft Consulting Ltd

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