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Six Steps of Mental Framework to Nail A Coding Interview
Take A Breath. This Will Work.
(The Six-step Mental Framework book is out! Grab a copy here!)
Now you have practiced hundreds of coding questions on HackerRank and LeetCode for weeks. When the interviewer finally reveals the coding problem, you are still feeling nervous. For a split second, you almost get lost and don’t know where to start. Suddenly you notice the 45-minute clock has been ticking, so your mind goes blank again.
I have been there, and I know that feeling.
Throughout my career, I have interviewed hundreds of software engineer candidates, when working for big tech companies and also hiring for my own company Roxy. I have found that stellar interview candidates have something in common — they have a consistent mental framework to solve problems within a limited amount of time. This mental framework can be reused almost for every coding problem.
In this article, I will walk you through these 6 steps of the mental framework. At each step, I will use this coding interview question “convert a number to English words”, to illustrate how to apply this framework during a coding interview.
Step 1. Write down the problem (1 minute)
Most of the time, interviewers just verbally describe the question, but you need to write it down. This helps you internalize what this problem is. At the same time, you can use it to “force” the interviewer to confirm your understanding. This is the power of writing.
If you are in a phone interview, you can type down the whole question on the online shared editor (such as CollabEdit). If you are doing it on the whiteboard, write it down on the board.
In case that what you’ve written down is different from what the interviewer wants you to do, they should let you know before your solution deviates too much from the problem.
Write a function to convert a given number to English words. For example, the input is 123, and the output is “one hundred twenty three”.
