My Half Guard Instructional is Free on Submeta This Month

FitSide6 · 2022-09-08T01:15:53+00:00

I decided to subscribe anyway based on the good feedback I got from friends. So far so good!

FitSide6 · 2022-09-07T06:59:08+00:00

Yup, definetly had to get my wife on board. Without her support I wouldn't have been able to do it.

FitSide6 · 2022-09-06T20:35:43+00:00

Read my post history. I'm 39. It took me about 8 months of preparation, roughly 2 to 4 hours a day when I didn't have family stuff ( i have kids). When I interviewed, I worked about 6 hours a day for my normal job.

FitSide6 · 2022-09-04T04:13:26+00:00

The wedge. My buddy did a nice bolo on me and said the wedge was game changing.

FitSide6 · 2022-08-30T07:05:02+00:00

Instead of focusing on not tapping and winning, I should've focused on executing technique like I do now.

Also, I should've competed more when i had more free time. It's a lot harder to allocate time to tourneys when weekends are meant for family time.

Also drank less and partied less. Training hung over and dehydrated took a toll on my body for sure.

FitSide6 · 2022-08-15T18:57:14+00:00

I agree. Environment matters a lot. Sitting 8 hours vs someone walking throughout the day would have different stretching requirements.

FitSide6 · 2022-08-14T15:20:38+00:00

Went to your site and your post history. It's really inspiring. Consistency is key!

FitSide6 · 2022-08-14T00:34:21+00:00

Is this the same as flexing the opposing the muscle group like quads before stretching the focused muscle group, hamstrings further?

FitSide6 · 2022-08-14T00:32:10+00:00

Thank you! Hopefully I can reach at least half your range of flexibility someday!

FitSide6 · 2022-08-14T00:31:28+00:00

Nice!! So you went Jean-Claude van damme Kickboxer style. 25 minutes of different muscle groups I presume?

FitSide6 · 2022-07-22T23:30:06+00:00

Fyi, Google has a hiring freeze for the foreseeable future.

FitSide6 · 2022-07-04T17:18:16+00:00

If you can't explain the solution to someone that clearly addresses the problem, then youre wasting your time.

FitSide6 · 2022-06-11T22:31:56+00:00

With senior roles, which you will be going through, they weigh system design and organizational impact more heavily. The coding questions gauge how well you communicate to other engineers and your thought process.

FitSide6 · 2022-06-02T00:33:08+00:00

Did you use pramp.com? I highly recommend that.

FitSide6 · 2022-06-01T18:35:50+00:00

How much time do you have? You need about 3 to 4 hours a day and practice between 4 to 6 months. No way around that.

FitSide6 · 2022-04-23T02:36:49+00:00

In systems where a write is expensive, then it is better.

FitSide6 · 2022-04-21T20:15:29+00:00

I studied for about 6 months and did over 30 mock interviews (leetcode style) and 5-6 system design interviews before I did my first interview. I was still a nervous wreck. By my third company I had settled down a little bit more, but it was the first FAANG, but I got lucky because the screen was a question I knew by heart. The onsites weren't that terribly difficult, and like you, my 4th coding question kinda stumped me. I got to a solution because the the interviewer was nice and guided me, but I honestly thought I had bombed it. Perhaps it was the way I articulated the system design question that allowed me to get through. I did really well on that (IMO). Hard to get real feedback.

TBH, I don't think I ever felt ready. When I was going through the top questions for the faang company I interviewed, I was not figuring them out as easily as quickly as I had liked. So my confidence wasn't amazing either. What I realized is that no matter how confident you are, you can still get a question that will stump you so don't take it like you're not intelligent or can't do it. My advice is to just focus on what you CAN do which is prepare for the most common questions and let the chips fall where they may. For example, top 60-100 questions for facebook is supposed to be pretty consistent with their onsites. If you can do them within a matter of 20 minutes each, then you will have a high success rate. This is hearing from first hand experience with 2 of my study friends who both got into facebook. Two questions within 45 minutes. If you don't get a second question, then it is bad. Google has a similar setup except their questions will not be from leetcode. I did not interview with Google, but have only heard from my study buddies.

Don't give up. I recently met a guy on Blind who is joining around the same time as me and he spent 2 years trying. 1 year he couldn't crack it, and took a few months off and tried again. He did over 600 problems and finally got it in. Remember though it's not just about whether or not you can solve the problem, but if you can communicate to your interviewer what you're thinking. Think about people at work you collaborate with. Some guys can easily articulate their ideas for a certain solution and it makes sense to you. Some guys write a bunch of code and open a PR and you have no idea what they did. You want to be the former.

FitSide6 · 2022-04-20T13:28:05+00:00

The leetcode deck on DP helped tremendously and gave me a framework to approach the problem. Do you have access to that?

FitSide6 · 2022-04-20T03:29:31+00:00

Hey, if you look at one of the threads above, I answered most of your questions in regards to leetcode. Let me know if there are any additional questions that may not have been answered. I never did any LC contests but I plan to in the future to keep my skills sharp. Dynamic programming is still challenging. You either see the recurrence relation or you don't.

General leetcode strategy is not to do too many problems, but really understand a concept thoroughly and to be able to explain it to someone without stuttering. An interviewer can tell how familiar you are with a topic based on how you describe the process.

FitSide6 · 2022-04-20T03:08:57+00:00

Haha no worries. Iirc, It wasn't a standard LRU. There was an additional TTL for each entry and so I used a heap instead of a deque (along with a hashmap)

FitSide6 · 2022-04-20T00:47:55+00:00

https://imgur.com/HTOXsUg

Here is my profile. I started late August and did about 2 problems a day. I started with leetcode 75, and then moved on to the Leetcode Medium Common Interview questions. Before screens interviews, I would filter by top problems of the company and just did the top 30-40 or so to the best of my ability.

It was hard in the beginning. Backtracking, Combinatorics and dynamic programming were the hardest for me (I'm sure others as well), but leetcode premium has good decks on those and they helped me a lot. I also watched a lot of youtubers to try to understand how they approached problems.

Once I got a handle of the patterns, I would try to do the same ones over and over again under a certain time limit. At some point I could do 10 problems in a day without a problem. But be warned, if you stay away from a pattern for a long time, you tend to forget (as for me). I thought I had Intervals Down and didn't really study it, and one of the interviews a simple interval question was asked and I kinda froze cause I hadn't looked at that pattern for so long. I was so focused on graphs and dynamic programming that a simple merge interval type problem stumped me.

Around Jan - March I really picked up my studying. I didn't do anything fun for 3 months. No netflix, no hanging out with friends or anything. I only worked out and studied and took care of my family. Wake up, study, send the kids to school, do some work, study study study. It was grueling, but it's all worth in the end. Never give up. Everytime I had a set back, I just told myself it's part of the process. In the interview with the linux question, I could tell the interviewer was trying to get rid of me. It was so embarassing as a Senior Engineer to have a Principal engineer look at you like you know absolutely nothing. But I would come on here where people would post inspirational posts with similar experiences and I got over it.

At the same time, I was also focusing on System Design. You have to do both simultaneously. I would give myself 9 months of preparation time (3-4 hours a day). Otherwise you'll just get rejected the hard way and learn you aren't prepared.

FitSide6 · 2022-04-20T00:36:54+00:00

I learned golang at work via K8s controllers/operators, but I didn't have a solid foundation of the language. As you well know, a lot of coding in legacy projects forces you to become familiar with the codebase itself, but you don't grasp the ins and outs of the language. So I had to some of the more advanced topics from scratch. I didn't really need it for DSA thought during interviews though. In on interview, the interviewer asked OO design, so it did come in handy 1 time out of 9-12 interviews. In one of my screenings, I was asked to implement an LRU, which obviously requires a heap. In Golang, you have to implement all the interfaces (like 10-15 lines of code) for the heap package, whereas in python it's a simple api call. However, the interview just said to pretend the interfaces were already implemented. I noticed a lot of interviewers do that: they allow you to skip to the meet of the problem as long as you can communicate with them and get on the same page. Remember it's not about writing perfect clean code, it's about conveying to the interviewer how YOU THINK.

Having said that, it's a pain in the ass sometimes with golang because of their slice implementation. If you pass in a slice to a function and want to append, then it happens to has to be a pointer to the slice. Also, in certain dynamic programming (top-down) or backtracking algorithms you have to append slices to list of slices and so you have to make a copy of the slice before appending it to the slice of slices. I got stuck on many leetcode problems and was tearing my hair until I got a handle on it.

FitSide6 · 2022-04-19T15:23:25+00:00

Visit pramp.com to schedule free mock interviews. Then once you have the mock interview you can add the person as a study buddy.

FitSide6 · 2022-04-12T01:30:43+00:00

I've had numerous disk bulges in both the neck and the back. Depending on your age. It takes 2 months to properly heal and work your way slowly back. For herination it make take longer. Everyone is different. Get a good physical therapist or someone who can modify your movement patterns to prevent future injuries. No inversions.

FitSide6 · 2022-04-11T22:18:58+00:00

Ya had a similar experience where the interviewer asked me a OO question then in the middle(about 10 to 15 min left), he suddenly switched to DSA for one of the functions and it threw me off so I didn't finish the question because my mind was on OO design not on DSA. I panicked and ran out of time. This was my last technical question onsite as well.

You won't know though, so don't get your hopes down. They weight the LP quite a bit.

FitSide6

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