How to Structure your Interview Answers[Technique Tuesdays]

When practicing for your mock interviews, make sure you run through this checklist.

Apr 27, 2022

What is up you amazing people,

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As anyone familiar with my system knows, I place a large emphasis on Mock Interviews. Leetcode is great, but it doesn’t get you into the habit of asking clarifying questions, coding up your solution in one go, or explaining your thought process to another person. These are all crucial in your interviews.

The solutions you know and love so much are actually structured very similar manner to this. So you know this works very well.

That changes today. I will go over the system that I recommend that my students use to structure their answers during their interviews. A lot of you have really appreciated the clarity and logical progression of my solutions to Leetcode Style problems. This is the structure I use to come up with the solutions. Play around with this process, and integrate this into your interviews for amazing results.

1. Edge/Base Cases

By far the easiest way to get started on any challenging coding problem. Look at the corner/edge cases and resolve them immediately. It can be as simple as checking for certain conditions and returning the appropriate values. But this is generally a good starting point. This is helpful not only in recursion but in all kinds of complex problems. Why do we do this first?

Three reasons:

Harder problems can get pretty overwhelming. Solving the more obvious edge cases will get your mind warmed up to the main problem. The edge cases can give you a good launching-off point for your main problem. Taking the low-hanging fruit first will also get you going and give you momentum. This is crucial in a high-pressure situation like an interview.
Often, what messes people up are edge cases. Many people try to solve the general problem first. As they do this, they end up missing the corner cases that need to be handled efficiently.
These cases can provide a few hints. This is especially true for recursive problems.

I typically recommend that my students explore these cases while asking the interviewers clarifying questions. Clarifying questions are questions about the constraints of the problem, that can often reveal certain attributes about the nature of the problem/solution.

You will see me do this implicitly in the first steps. As I explore the ins and outs of a problem, I often build up the details from Base Cases. For details, look at our post on building recursive solutions.

2. Running through your hypothetical solution by hand

Imagine you had a working black box code. If you printed the state at each moment, what would it look like? Going through some simple cases by hand will help you get an intuition for how the problem might be solved. For example, let’s take a question where we must interleaf a stack with itself using only a queue. So a stack (1,2,3,4,5) becomes (1,5,2,4,3). Google loves this question. I was able to solve this question by just taking a small stack and running through what a solution would do. Not HOW (what we have to solve). Just WHAT it would look like.

This method is a way to avoid getting stuck. Imagine there’s a question that’s very hard. You have no idea how to proceed. Just working through some possible ways your code could work will allow your mind to focus. This is much better than sitting there and awkwardly scratching at a possible solution (or even worse, freezing up). Combined with your base cases, you might even be able to generate some pseudocode.

Writing Psuedocode/actual code

This is where your knowledge and practice come in handy. When you have worked out the “WHAT” of your solution, we can get to the HOW. You can chip off little pieces at a time, figuring out the solution incrementally. This is where practices like modularity and encapsulation are useful. There are no tricks to this section., so I won’t waste too much time on it. Nor should I have to tell you why this is important.

As you can see, this approach works wonders. To make the most of this advice, make sure you get a premium subscription. The results speak for themselves.

Exploring Tradeoffs

This is a section that a lot of people miss. However, this is something that can really set you apart. Imagine you have a working, efficient code. Now is when you can score a lot of brownie points with your interviewers. How? Start talking about other possible ways you would solve it. Could we solve it using another data structure? Could we increase time complexity, but save space? Are there alternative data structures that could be used? You don’t have to give specifics. This is where you can be high level. You’ve already demonstrated your technical implementation skills. If you solved something recursively, now is also a good time to talk about how you might solve it iteratively or vice versa. Now is when you get bonus points for creativity and knowledge. And sometimes, you might have missed the optimal solution. This process will make you more likely to catch it.

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Happy Prep. I’ll see you at your dream job.

Good things take time,

Devansh <3

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