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Technical Interviews

Coding, system design and behavioral rounds.

Also known as: coding interview, technical screen

Technical interviews check how you think and how you write code. A typical process has a few rounds: a coding round where you solve a problem while explaining your approach, a discussion of a past project, and a behavioral round. Junior roles usually put more weight on coding and fundamentals than on system design.

In a coding round, talk through your thinking. Restate the problem, ask about inputs and edge cases, give a simple solution first, then improve it. Interviewers often care more about how you reason and respond to hints than about a perfect answer.

Problem: find the first repeated character in a string.
Approach: use a set of characters seen so far, return the first one found again.
Edge case: no repeats; empty string.

Practice out loud. Solving a problem silently is different from explaining it while someone watches. Use the language you’ll use on the job, and be honest when you don’t know something.

The classic mistake is memorizing solutions to common problems without understanding them. Interviewers often change the constraints, and a memorized answer breaks. Learn the underlying patterns, and see behavioral interviews for the other rounds.