The Broken System
In your daily job as a React developer, you will center divs, fetch APIs, and fix CSS bugs. But in your job interview, you will be asked to invert a Binary Tree on a whiteboard in 20 minutes. It's frustrating, but it's the game you have to play.
How to Beat the Game
Do not try to memorize 500 LeetCode questions. Instead, master the underlying patterns.
- Two Pointers technique.
- Sliding Window protocol.
- Depth-First Search (DFS) for graphs and trees.
- If you understand these 3 patterns, you can solve 80% of medium-level interview questions.
Communicate While Coding
Interviewer secret: They don't just want the right answer. They want to see how you think. If you write the perfect code in total silence, you might fail. Talk out loud. Say: 'I am thinking of using a Hash Map here to reduce time complexity from O(n^2) to O(n).'