A competitive programmer’s interview

How long have u been a competitive programmer?
About 9 years.

Top two websites you prefer to compete?
Codingame, Topcoder

What are some of the must attend competitions for a competitive programmer?
ACM ICPC, Google Code Jam, Facebook Hacker Cup

Who is your inspiration in competitive programming?
I can name a lot.. To quickly name two – Radhakrishnan venkataramani and Arjun Arul

What is ur favorite datastructure?
AVL tree. Everything is log(n) in an AVL tree. We can implement pretty much everything with it.

What is ur favorite STL in C++?
Map. Map has all the features as an AVL Tree. Map helped me solve a huge % of the problems I faced.

Why are dynamic programming problems are often hard to solve?
DP is not that hard once you learn to visualize the problem as a graph. Read about DAG and Topological sorting. This should boost the confidence in DP.

Do you suggest GeeksForGeeks for interview preparation?
Yes. GFG has very good questions. Solving many problems in GFG boosts the confidence before attending any interview.

What should one do when he is unable to solve a problem?
Many students quickly give up if they are unable to solve a problem and read the answer. In such cases I would suggest them to keep on thinking and sketching the problem and trying various approaches until they give up. That way they can learn many approaches to solve a problem. Recently they have also created an online judge. So we can test our code there.

Top two programming languages you prefer for CP?
C++, Java

Top two programming languages you prefer at work?
C#, Python

You have experience in attending Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft interviews. Which interviews were the best?
Google and Zoho tested my creativity with interesting and challenging questions.
Facebook’s interviewers expect to solve the problems very quickly as in the movie Social Network.
Amazon and Microsoft interview questions were similar to the medium level problems in GFG.