Overview of Pramp
Pramp is a free, online peer-focused platform focused on providing practice for technical interviews. It features a community of software engineers who help each other prepare for upcoming coding interviews. The platform features six types of interviews: data structures and algorithms, product management, behavioral, system design, frontend, and data science. The platform’s highlight is the ability to be both the interviewer and interviewee during the interview and receive peer feedback from a hand-selected peer.
What does Pramp do?
Pramp allows users to match with other engineers based on availability, practice needs, and programming language preferences. Interviews feature a one on one live video session using the Pramp website and collaborative code editors. The platform also handles scheduling and interview prep.
Each practice session allows the interviewer and interviewee positions to be exchanged, making the interview bi-directional. This helps people both learn from giving the interview and doing the interview. Acting as the interviewer enables you to internalize the “Do’s” and “Don’ts” in an interview while doing the interview helps you practice your technical skills.
Pramp offers a variety of interview types, including:
- Data Structures and Algorithms
- Product Management
- Behavioral
- System Design
- Frontend
- Data Science
Data structures and algorithms (DS&A) interviews focus on demonstrating a structured approach to solve these types of interview questions. Users will be able to provide an optimal solution, adapt to the requirements, and defend answers with valid explanations. The peer to peer interface will encourage working together and help uncover new techniques to help understand the interview from both sides. Using this type of interview will help you sharpen your problem-solving, communication, and coding skills.
Product management focuses on solving problems systematically and logically while establishing reasonable assumptions. The simulated interview environment will help you brainstorm feature improvements, recommend solutions with fellow product managers, and gain insight into the interview process.
Behavioral interview questions focus on being interviewed in a no-risk environment and overcoming difficulties in communicating your professional experiences. You can also see how to use a structured approach known as the Situation-Action-Result (SAR) method to sharpen your communication skills in a simulated environment.
System design interviews clarify ambiguities by asking the right questions and clearly defining the system’s goals to succeed. You will be able to demonstrate how you understand real-world tradeoffs by leading a discussion.
Frontend interviews will help you complete mock technical interviews while overcoming speaking, reasoning, and coding a solution through practice using HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
Data science interviews focus on demonstrating your abilities to understand a business problem, turn it into a mathematical one data science can solve, and cover the solution into a non-data solution that can be acted on. This will help you develop techniques for approaching data science interview questions through problem-solving, communication, and quantitative skills.
Who is Pramp for?
Pramp is useful for software engineers and product managers who want to participate in mock interviews. To get the most out of the platform, you will want to have the necessary background experience and skills to get the jobs. The platform only provides mock interviews without training, solutions, or additional help, so this is vital to get the most out of using Pramp.
Pramp Pricing
Pramp is free for users. When creating an account, you will provide information on your background, availability, practice goals, work experience, education, preferred programming languages, selected practicing topics, and a few other things. This will help the platform understand what you need and the best ways to prepare for your interviews.
Pramp Reviews and Ratings
The ratings and reviews for Pramp online liked the feature that users could practice on both sides of the table to be both the interview and interviewee. Other positive points were that the platform was free to use and had good content.
However, some users felt Pramp was less helpful in practicing technical interview questions on their own and wanted a more structured format. Other negative points included having to wait for an interview session to be available, making it difficult for users to plan if they had a tight timeline.
Alternatives to Pramp
- Interviewing.io: Allows users to participate in mock interviews with software engineers at top tech companies.
- Interview Cake: It helps users study and teaches people how to properly frame their thinking to solve technical questions to do well in interviews.
- CodeBasil: This is a compilation of software engineers’ questions at companies such as Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.
- AlgoExpert: Features practice questions for a variety of interview topics for software engineering technical interviews.
- Gainlo: This is a paid alternative, focusing on software engineering technical interviews, but does not offer job-matching.
- DesignerUp: Features online self-guided or instructor-led product design courses.
- Coderbyte: Offers a mix of free and paid resources for software engineers to practice their skills.
- CodeKata: Provides users with real-world challenges, mimicking requests from top tech companies.
- HackerRank: This is another alternative with software engineering technical interview questions.
- Leetcode: One of the most popular alternatives. Useful for software engineers practicing technical interview questions, but without mock interviews.
- CheckiO: Another great free resource with exercises for Python and JavaScript for all software engineering levels.
Conclusion
Pramp is a platform that allows users to participate in mock interviews as both the interviewer and interviewee. Users can give and receive feedback on their performance using a Peer Review feedback sheet, but there is no technical or behavioral help from experts. The platform does not also have any resume or additional guidance on soft skills, but the platform is free to use. Pramp also features six types of interviews, all offering different skills that are tested.