EDIT: Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview is out now! Here’s the table of contents:
I have some exciting news. Along with Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Mike Mroczka, and Nil Mamano, I’m writing the official sequel to Cracking the Coding Interview (often called the bible of technical interview prep). It’s fittingly called Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview.
I’ve always wanted to write a book about technical interviewing. And this is it. And of course it’ll draw on all the hiring data we’ve collected over the past decade at interviewing.io.
Technical interviews are much harder today than they used to be. Engineers study for months and routinely get down-leveled despite that. Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, in addition to covering a bunch of new questions and topics, teaches you how to think instead of memorizing. Grinding and memorization isn’t the way in this market (though in fairness, it’s never really the way). With us, you’ll still have to do the work, of course, but we’ll teach you to work smarter.
We added at least thirteen new technical topics (I say “at least” because we’re still writing, and it might be more like twenty)—and over 150 new problems. Each problem includes step-by-step walkthroughs, and you can work each problem with our (actually good) AI Interviewer. And of course this book was written in partnership with interviewing.io. We’ve pulled in data from over 100k FAANG mock interviews on interviewing.io, and we include hundreds of curated interview replays from interviewing.io (shared with permission of course) – watch people make mistakes and learn so you’re not doomed to repeat them.
But it’s not just about interview prep. In today’s job market, the bar is higher but it’s also harder than ever to get noticed and run your job search end-to-end. My excellent co-authors killed it on the technical chapters. I focused on writing the job search stuff, including, but not limited to:
- How to negotiate, exactly what to say, and how to not screw up your negotiations before they even start
- How to manage your job search, end to end, and balance interview prep with applications and outreach
- A worksheet to help you figure out what order you need to engage with the companies you’re targeting to ensure that all your offers come in at the same time
- How to get in the door at top companies without relying on referrals, including email templates and examples of good and bad outreach
- An internal look at FAANG (and other) company rubrics to help understand what interviewers really care about, no matter what company you’re applying to
- What you need to know about behavioral interviews, whether you want to or not, and how to avoid the mistakes that even great engineers make
- A list of very specific questions to ask your interviewers (not just to look smart but to learn useful things)
- How technical interviews got to be so broken and how to get over hating them so you can win
I also spend some time on owning and sharing data on how flawed technical interviewing is and, most importantly, how to manage your psychology so you can get past that. I see so many engineers opting out of this interview style, arguably for good reason. But you’re leaving a lot of good opportunities on the table, and it doesn’t have to be like that.
This book is so much of what I’ve blogged about for the last 15 years, but it’s fleshed out with much more detail and actionable advice. If you read it, let me know what you think. Technical interviewing sucks (and so does looking for a job). But this book will help you do it well and get out alive.
**Purchases of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview get a $50 discount for interviewing.io. The book costs $45, so it’s not a bad deal. The book is out in January of 2025, and you can get it on Amazon.
