Tech Interview Workshops

Sponsored by the Women In Computer Science Club at Hunter College.

• Problem Solving & Whiteboarding: Most Wednesdays, 9:30-11am: 1001-E HN: These are themed office hours, open to all students who wish to practice problem solving (found in programming & algorithms courses and technical interviews).
• These meet in the 1001E lab and will start 11 September.
• Since it's in the 1001E lab, no food is allowed, but you may have drinks in closed containers.
• All those who attend will be expected to work in pairs or small groups during the session.
• We will be using problems from leet code (free, but registration required) and Cracking the Coding Interview and roughly following this outline for approaching problems.
• To learn more and get involved with the Women in Computer Science club, join hunterwomenincs.slack.com group or write info AT hunterwics com.

The schedule for the sessions:

• 11 September: Introduction to whiteboarding: philosophy, examples and rubrics. Seven steps for acing a tech interview.
• 18 September: Step 1: Listen. Identify inputs and outputs for technical questions.
• 25 September: Step 2: Clarify the question. Ask questions to figure out what type of input and design examples that demonstrate representative (and hard) cases (clarify, repeat, example).
• 2 October: No meeting-- research travel.
• 8 October: No meeting-- no classes scheduled.
• 16 October: No meeting-- classes follow Monday schedule.
• 23 October: No meeting-- outreach to middle school (piloting science meets computing curriculum.
• 30 October: No meeting-- research travel.
• 6 November: Step 3: Functional Signature. Translating inputs & outputs into functional notation. Choosing names. Top-down design. Writing pseudocode.
• 13 November: Step 4: Brute Force Solution & Performance. How long does it take? Running-time overview.
• 20 November: Step 5: Refining answers: Bottlenecks, Unused Information, Duplicate Work. What are the hard cases? What information was given in the problem but not used? Are you repeating code?
• 27 November: Step 6: Implement Solution. Translating your pseudocode into code.
• 4 December: Step 7: Test. What inputs would test your code? How do you choose?
• 11 December: Putting It Altogether: whiteboarding practice problems.

(Last updated on 19 August 2019.)