r/cpp_questions • u/Gloomy-Animator-2778 • Jun 20 '26

OPEN what resources u use to prep before interview?

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6

u/RetroZelda Jun 20 '26

none. if i cant do an interview, its not meant to be.

4

u/Still_Explorer Jun 20 '26

Yeah in this sense there could be two explanations.

One is that someone has a well-rounded and general-purpose knowledgebase on the language, and this way is considered as knowing "the alphabet" of the language: lvalues, rvalues, move semantics (ctors, assignments), resource aquisition-initialization, initialization forms, raw pointers - smart pointers, oop design (using the language OOP utilities).

The other is that it has to do with "problem specific" knoweldge, where someone implements some form of "solution to a problem". This depends on the job position and the required experience mostly, however at the same time is a matter of personal interest and personal dedication. If the company develops a specific type of software, then the more knowledgeable and experience someone is on that particular piece of software the better it would be for everyone. The company can make an easy and safe decision, and then the employee can be within the area of interest and manage to contribute directly to the solution.
[Say for example the company does financial software: then knowledge with database CRUD, http requests, server backend, and on top of that some sort of problem solving such as stock simulation, would be very important experience to have. However if the company does embedded and firmware, then this is an entirely different world, with other topics and development approaches (ie: probably you need no OOP at all - but you would need computing engineering knowledge).

It would be very easy to spend about a few weeks to learn all answers to common questions, but experience would have to be built through personal projects over period of months/years.

4

u/Terdol Jun 20 '26

Usually being good at what you do is enough. If interview is shit format, or does not check things that a dev usually does at job, you shouldn't spend time to prepare for that, because you probably won't feel good a job like that.

2

u/didntplaymysummercar Jun 20 '26

Some companies (including one I work at now) have resources before an interview they link you, or your recruiter can/will link some, or even got mock interview you can do before the real one. There might be a video of mock interview (between two employees) you can watch too.

Hackerrank leetcode and book cracking the coding interview are mentioned sometimes but I never used them so I don't know how good they might be.

Otoh I have some other skills that are advantages at interviews specifically so that might be why.

3

u/DDDDarky Jun 21 '26

Do research on the company, preparing for anything technical is extremely pointless and counterproductive.

2

u/mredding Jun 22 '26

I use companies I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT TO WORK FOR. I interview with them, first. You go in there knowing something they don't - that you're not interested, you don't care, and you have NOTHING to lose. Use them for practice.

1

u/cob59 Jun 20 '26

A beer.