A Checklist for Your Next SWE Interview

Software Engineering (SWE) interviews are known to be some of the hardest to prepare for, both mentally and physically. I found myself in one of the worst mental states of my life during the recruitment season last year due to how draining the process can be. With this article, I hope to alleviate some of your cognitive load by providing a checklist of things you should do before your interview to prepare. I’ve learned a lot from my interviews last year and even more from the rejections I received, so I genuinely hope this helps you learn from my mistakes.

I’m going to assume that you already know data structures and algorithms and have done some Leetcoding as you enter the recruitment cycle. This article aims to help you solidify a plan for just a month leading up to an interview. However, I highly recommend starting Leetcode prep long before you begin applying for internships.

A Month Before…

You’re lucky if you even have this much time to prepare for an interview! So, if you currently don’t have any interviews, I would suggest doing the following for companies you are passionate about.

• Start reading a new piece of news about the company every day or every other day — you want to know and be able to ask insightful questions about the company.
• Create your Excel/Google Sheets document for that company: make a list of all the Leetcode problems popular with the company you’re interviewing with.
• Create three columns: the problem name, a one-sentence summary of how you solved it, and when you should review it again. You should solve these problems at least twice and practice explaining them out loud in a way you would teach it to someone who might not be able to code. Do this at least once.
• Try to condense the list to about 20 of the most important problems that you found the most challenging or insightful.

A Week Before…

• Redo the easy problems — a lot of the time, we forget about the basics.
• Explain the hard problems out loud from the ground up. You’ll be surprised how challenging it can be to explain the basics. I suggest trying to solve these problems with someone and getting feedback on how you can explain them better!
• Look at some system design problems specific to the company — what is the system design behind some of their biggest products or the product you will be working on? What would a prototype of the project look like on a much smaller scale?
• Make two lists of questions about your resume: 1) questions that would help you highlight your strengths; 2) questions you don’t want to be asked. Have answers or stories in mind for both sets of questions.
• Create your persona — what are the three qualities you would like to emphasize during the interview?
• What are some of the news articles or new information you found interesting? Prepare questions about them that you can ask after the interview.

Day Before…

If you can, don’t do anything the day before your interview. However, if you are an anxious person like me and need to be doing something, I suggest the following:

• Go through your resume front to back.
• Ask yourself the questions you prepared about your resume — focus on articulating your strengths in the best way possible, and condensing them into a few words; focus on why the other set of questions are so daunting to you.
• Make a list of what you want from the company.
• Make a list of questions about what you want to know about the company, about the interviewer, about the work done at the company, and about how you might fit into the company.
• Review visualizations for key data structures and algorithms — go over some of the basic structures for algorithms like BFS and DFS that might have a straightforward structure.
• Try not to do any more problems.

Although many of these points might seem “intuitive” to you right now, you’d be surprised how stressed you might get and how easily you could forget to do these things leading up to your interview. Following these steps will definitely set you up for success in your interview. I hope you find this article useful enough to refer back to when you’re stressed and that it helps to relieve some of your stress.