My desire to go to western China started at the beginning of the year. I spent the Spring Festival there with my startup partners. Although I've been there many times before, this time I felt a different kind of attraction. Mid-year, some minor changes at my company spurred my determination to take that step forward.

Previously, I was held back by reasons such as housing and green cards, but I later realized that these were not the main issues. The key was to take this step myself, and this year, external circumstances pushed me to take that step.

I went back to China in June to regroup, and at the end of June, I officially started planning my review and coding practice. In July, a friend contacted me and recommended a local Oracle website. Since the interview required Java and JavaScript content, I spent a month preparing and felt confident. However, yesterday I received the news that I failed the onsite interview. It was like a bolt from the blue. Although I'm very upset, I need to pull myself together and move forward.

I did a lot of research online today, including interview questions, question difficulty, and the amount of practice I should do. I feel quite confident now. I started this column based on advice and opinions from experienced people, hoping to receive everyone's guidance and blessings while recording my findings.

plan

The main text begins. Today is August 8th, 2017. My plan is to have the job offer during the Spring Festival and then start working after returning from the holiday. Therefore, the deadline is set for January 2018. Since I have already finished reviewing the Cracking Coding Interview and practiced some questions, if you want to refer to it, please add the time spent on the first two parts, which is about one month (the specific time for each part is shown below). Here is my plan:

• 8.8 – 9.10 Following the order in the book, find the corresponding questions, focusing on the easy ones.
• 9.11 Apply for the second batch of jobs
• September 11 – September 20: Complete all easy problems (fill in any gaps).
• 10.10 Apply for the first batch of work
• 11.1 Application for Priority Batch
• From September 20th to November 20th, complete all medium-level problems (330 problems in total, 6 problems per day).
• November 21 - December 30: Continued familiarizing myself with the problems and practicing some hard ones.

Looking forward to finishing the phone interviews before the new year and the onsite interviews in early January 2018.

Target Company/Company Classification

First, let me clarify that this batch only reflects the priority of my personal applications and is influenced by my personal preferences; it does not represent my ranking of the companies themselves. There are many other good companies, but due to time constraints, I wasn't able to conduct thorough research.

Because I have a special fondness for Google, I chose to interview in batches to gradually get into interview mode, familiarize myself with the process, gain experience, and ultimately succeed in the most competitive rounds.

Key batches:

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple

First batch:

LinkedIn, Oracle, Twitter, airbnb, Snapchat, Yahoo, ebay, Paypal, Evernote, wish, Microsoft, Pinterest, Netflix, nest, IBM, WhatsApp, Lyft, Uber, Yelp, Salesforce

Second batch:

Godaddy, Tesla, Spotify, carfax, trulia, zillow, bloomberg, , Dropbox, , Expedia, Strip, Fitbit, EA, EMC, Intuit, NetApp, NetSuite, Autodesk, Symantec, Riverbed, Quantcast, Concur, Aster Data, Citrix, Zynga, Skype, VMWare, Groupon, Box.net, Quora, A9.com, 126Lab, Palantir, Adobe, Hulu, Square

Actual strategy and time taken

I used a combination of Cracking Coding Interview and LeetCode to practice coding problems. First, I read the book and solved the relevant problems. Then I found related LeetCode problems and only worked on the easy ones (because I felt many middle problems required multiple techniques). After completing the easy problems in the book, I focused on solving the middle problems (again, according to category). The specific categories and time spent are as follows:

Phase 1 (Book + Easy)

Prior reading before the book (time complexity, sorting, etc.): 20 hours

String & Array: 40 hours, approximately 100 questions. Summary:https://blog.jing.do/4829

LinkedList: 6 hours, approximately 10 questions. Summary:https://blog.jing.do/5141

Stack & Queue: 3 hours, approximately 4 problems. Summary:https://blog.jing.do/5309

Search/Sort section: 10 hours, approximately 15 questions, many of them medium difficulty.