Having a framework by which you approach every single technical interview greatly improves your chances of success. It can’t help you have a perfect session, but almost guarantees you will have at least a mediocre session. Think of it like military SOPs. It helps to:

• show signals that the interviewer is looking for
• reduce the probability of panicking and having a terrible interview session
• do proper time management during the interview

Very important companions to this note:

• Communication during the technical interview
• Typical coding interview corner cases for various data structures/problems
• Questions to ask before you start coding during a technical interview
• Common techniques for coding problems

As a disclaimer, this framework is what I used when preparing specifically for the Google interview process. So it is tailored for 45-min interviews, out of which the first 5 I assumed as lost for self-introductions¹.

DON’T START CODING BEFORE YOU GET THE OK FROM YOUR INTERVIEWER.

00 - 05: Clarify

• Restate the problem in your own words.
• Ask clarifying questions.
• Work through input examples/test-cases. (critical: don’t start thinking about solution approaches yet)

05 - 10: Brute Force

• Figure out a brute force solution. Always make sure you get brute force correctly first ². Discuss time and space complexity.

10 - 15: Optimize

• Optimize the solution. Discuss various approaches with trade-offs and complexities.

15 - 30: Code

Code the solution. A complete non-optimal solution is better than an incomplete optimal.

30 - 35: Test

• Test the code
• Try edge cases
• Fix bugs

35 - 40: End of interview questions