I ran across the CareerCup website which says they can help prepare you for programming interviews with various US based top tech companies. They don’t “guarantee” anything, and the site appears to be backed by a well reviewed book*.
*The reviews are on Amazon
I have been an active member on StackOverflow so according to me best resource for preparation would be StackOverflow. But I saw that CareerCup has collected interview questions from various companies. So the key difference is that I would have to dig for interview questions within SO versus having questions already aggregated by the other site.
How do I go about evaluating the credibility of a website like this?
How can I evaluate if their interview preparation offerings are worthwhile?
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Sites like that are about as effective as SAT prep classes (and other similar things) are. In other words: They can’t guarantee you anything at all, but by going through their system you become more familiar with the process and can find areas of weakness to improve on.
Specifically:
- By looking at questions that candidates were actually asked, you can familiarize yourself with the style of the question and the thought processes you need to answer it, so that you can answer that type of question easier. However, memorizing the answers won’t help, because you then get more flustered if you get asked something you didn’t memorize or one you forgot the “correct” answer to.
- By looking at the types of skills that candidates needed to demonstrate, you can compare your own skill levels to them and see whether you need to go learn more. However, studying the specific things that got asked about in the past won’t help you answer if you haven’t used them enough to be fluent in them.
- By improving your comfort level you can present better in an interview. If you’re skilled but uncomfortable under pressure, this can help. If you’re not skilled, it won’t. If you’re in between, you can use it to direct your improvement.
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May be it helps to get this job, but in the long-term it’s more important to be honest. If that really helps to get that job, the expectations on you seem to be higher, than you really can fulfill them. And what’s a job worth, if you can’t perform? Either you may lose it, or if not you still won’t be satisfied, because you’re not a good match for the company.
And like I already mentioned in a question some days before: a big part of these tests is not about how good you can solve them, it’s more about how you do it, how you react, what happens if the stress level raises and so on.
What I want to point to is, that I think it’s not useful to specially train for an interview, because of two reasons: The expectation in your person may be wrong, because you specially trained for it and people just want to see your current state of knowledge. And the other point is that in these interviews a big part is not about the answer itself, it’s how you react, work and communicate.
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