How to Prepare for a Technical Interview in 4 Weeks
Four weeks is enough time to go from "I'm rusty" to "interview-ready" if you're focused. Here's a week-by-week plan used by engineers who land FAANG offers.
AI-powered with scored feedback and specific improvement tips.
Week 1: Foundations (Arrays, Strings, HashMaps)
Focus on the most common patterns: two pointers, sliding window, frequency counting with hashmaps. Aim for 2-3 problems per day. Don't look at the solution immediately — spend at least 20 minutes on each problem first. Key problems: Two Sum, Valid Anagram, Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters, Product of Array Except Self.
Week 2: Trees, Graphs, BFS/DFS
Trees and graphs appear in 30%+ of technical interviews. Master recursive DFS, iterative BFS with a queue, and the common tree traversals (inorder, preorder, postorder). Key problems: Binary Tree Level Order Traversal, Validate BST, Number of Islands, Clone Graph.
Week 3: Dynamic Programming & Harder Patterns
DP is the most feared topic, but most interview DP is just tabulation or memoization of recursion. Learn the patterns: 1D DP (Climbing Stairs, House Robber), 2D DP (Unique Paths, Longest Common Subsequence). Also cover: binary search variations, stack problems, heap/priority queue.
Week 4: Mock Interviews and Review
The final week is for simulating real conditions. Run timed 45-minute mock interviews. Practice explaining your approach before coding. Review your weak spots from weeks 1-3. Run at least 3 full mock interviews before your real one.
The Meta-Skill: Thinking Out Loud
Most rejections in technical interviews happen not because of a wrong answer but because the candidate went silent. Interviewers want to see your reasoning process. Practice narrating: "I'm thinking about using a hashmap here because... the trade-off is... let me first try the naive approach and then optimize."
Key Takeaways
- →Consistency beats intensity — 45 min/day beats 6 hrs on Sundays
- →Review problems you got wrong within 24 hours while the error is fresh
- →Use a timer to simulate interview pressure from week 3 onward