Interview Kickstart

• Interview kickstart is a fabulous coding academy. They have many interesting foundation videos. It helped me to get good grasp of concepts of Recursion, Dynamic Programming and other important topics. The instructor is an alumni of IIT and Stanford PhD graduate with great teaching skills. 
• IK provided me an opportunity to schedule mock interviews with managers at Google, Amazon, and many other top notch companies. This gave me a glimpse of challenges I would face in a real interview and feedback helped to take definitive steps towards enhancing interviewing skills. They also have technical coaching and system design session which help you to schedule 1:1 discussions with experts. 
• This course helps you connect fellow learners with similar background and attend sessions together. They allow everybody to ask questions which enable you to envision problems faced by engineers with 20+ years of experience. 
• IK has a coding platform which resembles Leet-Code. It is well organized and curated so that you practice the concepts learned in class. 
• It would be very helpful if you join this course after 3+ years of experience as it connects you best people in industry with 25+ years of experience. They truly care about your growth and ready help you go Up Level. I would highly recommend and it's worth the amount you spend. 

• First step is getting interviews. IK shines in this area, because IK has a lot of recruiters on their team.
  • IK's resume format WORKS. It autoscans properly, it plays well with LinkedIn algorithms, and most importantly, it catches the eye of recruiters and makes it easy for them to parse. Since recruiters will only gather a finite set of candidates when they are hunting and they will simply toss anything that causes them to slow down, this is very important.  
  • Their approach to promoting yourself on LinkedIn WORKS. For me, the uptick was dramatic, going from 1-2 recruiters reaching out to me per month to 1-3 very valid reach-outs per week.
  • IK resume reviews are extremely helpful, and they optimize for match stickiness. 
  • But you also have to always be applying to new jobs that are posted on LinkedIn. Every single day.  
• Then it's interview time. The interviews themselves are really tough these days - algorithm/coding, system design, behavioral
  • The bulk of the IK program is all about teaching you how to excel in all three areas. The biggest plus of IK is that you can do a ton of mock interviewers with real hiring managers in FAANG companies. You can study all you want, but the mocks are where the real value is. You get a bunch of useful feedback; you do then need to then do a bunch more work to actually apply the feedback constructively. No free lunch here.
  • IK does a LOT of in-person classes, and captures each class as a video you can look at later. I actually got a subscription to Educative as well, because it allowed me to easily find specific material instead of trying to find something in a video. I'd like to see IK publish text-based summary guides that become available AFTER you've done a live class in addition to the videos.
  • IK's classes are quite interactive, and that's very important. The only way to actually learn something is to do it. Their coding exercises are very useful and challenging, with a nice system for running a wide range of test cases against your code. One thing that I found a little annoying - as a JavaScript programmer, the input parameters as documented were often not quite right. I got into the habit of always doing a console.log() on the input parameters to see what they actually were before writing any code. 
  • This part of IK can be absolutely overwhelming, because there's just so much to learn. I've found that the best approach is to always move on to whatever is being taught in the current week, even if you haven't finished what was taught in the previous week. Otherwise, you will fall behind completely. You can always go back, but very often getting to 80% in an area will do the trick in real life. 
  • A little trick - if you do a coding interview, check out the person who will be doing the interview on LinkedIn. If possible, do the coding interview in a language that you know but they don't. Then you are teaching them things as well as them teaching you things, which can lead to a better interview.
• Behavioral interview coaching is SUPER important. We all tend to ramble, not frame answers correctly, etc. IK is really good at getting you to be succinct, to the point and relevant. Very important to do some behavioral mock interviews, not only technical. The reason I signed up for IK in the first place was because I completely bombed a few interviews at the beginning in this area. I knew I wasn't doing them right, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to do them better. 
• IK systems approach. IK believes that there is a systematic approach to all of these areas; that's what they are really teaching you. They have pretty simple "flows" for all of the interview types that work quite well because they are easy to remember in an interview situation where you are nervous to begin with. This was actually the biggest advantage of IK for me; they try and turn every aspect of interviews into these flows, and then you practice, practice, practice until they become second nature. 

Interview Kickstart has a very organized and extensive curriculum. They have thought of almost every way in which a student looking for better opportunities may want to be supported in their journey.  Also, I had a pleasant experience while working with Priyesh in the student success team. He is very professional and goes beyond the immediate ask to ensure I was getting the maximum value out of the program. He is very approachable and prompt in responding and willing to discuss strategies to better my results as well as any problems that I face. Due to a personal emergency, I lost a few weeks during the support period and he worked internally to get it extended to make up for the lost time and gave me suggestions to help me make the best use of my remaining support period. His support is exemplary. I depended on him for any queries or support I needed during the entire length of the course and knew it would be taken care of in the best possible way.