Overview of Interview Cake
Interview Cake is an excellent resource for software engineers to hone their technical skills before an interview. It does an outstanding job of providing a systematic way to prep while delivering the most important topics.
The best features of Interview Cake are the highly curated practice questions for your interview, which provide categorization by topic and company, and offer a risk-free purchase. If you are looking for video content or a defined study path, Interview Cake is not the place for you as it is text-based and organized by topic. According to their website, people have used Interview Cake haver gotten jobs at all of the companies below.
Features of Interview Cake
Interview Cake features a set of exercises and detailed articles to help make your coding interview a piece of cake. The self-paced course features all the information you will need to work through problem areas that many people struggle within their talks. What sets Interview Cake apart is its focus on understanding how to solve the problem, over just what the solution is.
Additionally, each practice problem is broken down into a series of steps that allow you to solve the problem on your own. Hints are also available if you get stuck, but do not reveal the solution. After you think you have the answer, Interview Cake will also show you common mistakes that people made. This is a feature that sets Interview Cake apart as it is like having an interviewer with you. Once you are confident in your solution, they will give you a breakdown of the solution and frame the problem in your mind to solve similar situations in the future.
Interview Cake also has incredibly helpful features such as an extensive archive of articles and interactive lessons in various topic areas. This will help you find resources for information on what you may not know and brush upon.
The main goal of Interview Cake is to prep you for your interviews. They are here to act as your interview home base and are continually updating and improving their course content to meet your needs.
The course includes a full breakdown of each solution, a gotcha list of common mistakes, a “what we learned” for each section of the practice question, and ideas on solving similar problems. Additionally, all questions are grouped in categories related to language, topic, or company.
Topics Interview Cake Covers
The content on Interview Cake can be broken down into 15 sections/topics. Each topic can also be subdivided into articles that you can review further in detail. Topics include:
- Algorithmic Thinking
- Array and String Manipulation
- Hashing and Hash Tables
- Greedy Algorithms
- Sorting, Searching, and Logarithms
- Trees and Graphs
- Dynamic Programming and Recursion
- Queues and Stacks
- Linked Lists
- System Design
- General Programming
- Bit Manipulation
- Combinatorics, Probability, and Other Math
- Javascript
- Coding Interview Tips
Who Should Use Interview Cake?
Interview Cake is for software engineers who need to do well in technical interviews. As the platform focuses on teaching you how to think about the types of questions asked, all software engineers can learn something.
Interview Cake Pricing
Interview Cake offers a variety of pricing levels as a pay-once option. There are no annoying subscriptions to remember to cancel as you pay when you want to access the material. The first tier option is 2 Weeks Access pass for $30; you can prepare for an interview. The second tier option is a 6 Month Access pass for $90 that is enough for a full job search without added time pressure. The third tier option is a 1 Year Access pass for $160 and is the best deal to allow you to practice and stay sharp continually. Interview Cake also offers a full refund if you do not get the job or are at all unsatisfied. Students are also able to receive special pricing with free access for three weeks.
Interview Cake Reviews and Ratings
Many reviews online are affiliated with paid partners advertising Interview Cake and are, therefore, mainly positive. However, individuals who are not connected still provided positive feedback on the quality of the questions and the variety, style, and depth of the solutions and hints they provide on each problem type.
Though it is important to note that it is recommended that users have a background in data structures and algorithms before spending money on Interview Cake.
Interview Cake Alternatives
Alternatives to Interview Cake include:
- Coderbyte: A mixture of free and paid resources helps software engineers to practice their skills.
- Interviewing.io: Useful for practicing mock interviews with soft engineers at top tech companies.
- Educative: Can help software engineers to brush up on skills or practice for specific-language interviews.
- AlgoExpert: Great for helping software engineers practice questions that cover many different interview topics.
- Leetcode: One of the most well-known, and most users feel the questions focus on real-world experience and have better practice for technical interviews. It also features significantly more questions than Interview Cake.
- CodeChef: This is a great free alternative as a free online community and platform to practice software engineering technical interview questions.
Conclusion
Interview Cake is an excellent tool for all levels of experienced software engineers to prepare for their technical interviews. The platform focuses on the user deriving solutions and framing how you think about engineering problems. This is extremely helpful, leading up to the challenges you will encounter in technical interviews. Overall, Interview Cake focuses on software engineers’ technological advancement by understanding the right way to think about and answer technical questions.
Interview Cake is recommended for someone looking for a concise set of materials to focus on essential topics to prepare for your interview. It removes a lot of the fluff that other resources have. Its recommended use is for those with a short period before their interview or hones your skills during a job search. If you are early in your career or someone who needs structure, Interview Cake may not be the right fit for you.