How to organize your thoughts on whiteboard and crush your technical interview

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Doug Arcuri piece on organizational skills and the applied science of gluing lots of things together in the craft of software engineering. Author empathizes with those who experience technical interviews that are not classically trained.

At large and small technical companies, there are whiteboard technical interviews. You are asked a question and are invited to solve the problem.

Make sure to write down the problem in a complete sentence up top. This will get you feeling the marker and will help you overcome the initial hit of the rush of “How do I solve this?”

Author then suggest how you can compose yourself and organize temporary space on whiteboard in few steps:

  • Step 1: The problem, a complete sentence up top
  • Step 2: Assumptions
  • Step 3: The approach with rough pseudocode, steps, and visualizations
  • Step 4: Code implementation
  • Step 5: Test (bonus)

Remember, there is pride in improving on top of code by way of organization and structure. Good read, with images of whiteboards in various stages.

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Tags programming agile career teams