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How do I pass a coding test? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by tomatol@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Seriously, been working as a software developer for 9 years now and never passed a single coding test.

The jobs I got were always the ones giving me weekend projects or just no coding test at all.

I have a job opportunity that looks exciting but they sent me this coding test link and I know I'm gonna fail for sure. Any tips aside from the obvious (practicing in advance on leetcode etc)?

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[-] tomatol@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The type of questions are really bizarre. Time pressure also.

I am a mobile dev so my day to day is dealing with UI, api requests, writing test cases, CI/CD stuff...

This is one example I remember being in a test: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/the-skyline-problem-using-divide-and-conquer-algorithm/

In that case it was books in a shelf and some other additions but yeah it's not something that I relate to at all.

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 4 points 6 months ago

Yeah, those kind of questions are silly and don’t reflect problems that happen in real life.

My advice when you get a question similar to this is to have a pen and paper at hand. Draw a few easy examples and find a solve those systematically by hand. From there you go to harder and harder examples and adapt your system for those examples. Try to find examples where your system fails.

Once you’re confident you’ve found all corner cases you can start to write down the algorithm.

That’s the advice I can give. Hope it helps!

[-] tomatol@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Definitely helpful! Thanks

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 2 points 6 months ago

When I think about it, what I just wrote is basically test driven development, but by hand on a piece of paper.

this post was submitted on 04 May 2024

113 points (99.1% liked)

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