Key hints to look for in an interview

During an interview, time and stress are serious factors that can affect concentration. Having the capacity to identify templates, recognize certain cases, guess the correct answer, and so on gives you a major advantage. As we stated in Chapter 5, How to Approach a Coding Challenge, in figure 5.2, building an example (or a use case) is the second step to tackling a coding challenge. Even if the code is given by the interviewer, building an example is still quite useful for determining Big O.

As you probably noticed, in almost every non-trivial example that we covered, we preferred to visualize the runtime for one or several concrete cases. That way, you can really understand the details of the code, identify the inputs, determine the static (constant) and dynamic (variable) parts of the code, and get a general view of how the code works.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of key hints that can help you in an interview:

• If the...