✓ · Part 6 · The week before
The week before, and the day itself
If you have a week before the interviews you actually care about, spend it like this. If you are walking in tomorrow, do day one tonight and go — your own story is worth more than any amount of revision.
- service (less often)
- product (less often)
- saas (less often)
- agency (less often)
Everything open, top to bottom.
02On this page
The seven-day plan
What they are really testingSequence. Most people revise what they already know and skip what they will be asked.
| Day | Focus | The actual work |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your own story | Fill in R10's template for every number on your resume, then run each one past its ten follow-ups. Practise the two-minute walkthrough of your last project from R1 out loud five times. Draw its architecture on paper three times from memory. Fix the two resume lines in the scouting report. |
| 2 | JavaScript & TypeScript | R3 and R3·TS end to end, out loud. Write debounce, throttle, Promise.all and the promise pool from scratch without looking. Make the event-loop ordering automatic. |
| 3 | React & Next.js | R4. Prepare the state-management migration defence properly, with your own migration if you have one — it is the most likely deep question in your loop. Re-read the Next 15/16 caching change until you can explain why the default flipped. |
| 4 | Backend & data | R5 and R6. Rehearse the no-message-broker answer until it sounds like judgement rather than apology. Write the five SQL queries by hand. |
| 5 | Machine coding | Build the task board and the data table under a real 90-minute timer, twice. The highest-return day on this list. |
| 6 | System design | Design the booking marketplace and the real-time dashboard out loud with a timer, using the seven-step frame. Record yourself once and listen back — it is unpleasant and it works. |
| 7 | DSA & behavioural | Eight problems each from hash map, two pointers and sliding window. Then write the six stories in R11 as bullet points, not scripts. |
Walk-in day
What they are really testingLogistics decide more outcomes than people admit.
Sequence the campaign
Interview at the companies you want least in the first two days. You will be sharper by day four, and you want your best performance where it pays most. Compress everything into one week so offers overlap.
Carry paper
Six printed resumes, a pen, a small notebook. Write down the interviewer's name and one thing they said in each round — it makes your follow-up email specific instead of generic.
Arrive early, and eat
Walk-ins run long and unpredictably. A four-hour queue on an empty stomach is how good candidates fail the last round. Water and something to eat.
Ten minutes of homework per company
In the queue, look up what they build and who their customers are. It costs nothing and turns "why do you want to work here" from a stumble into a strength.
Send the note the same evening
Short email to the recruiter: thanks, one specific thing from the conversation, one line restating availability. Very few candidates do this and it keeps you visible while they sort fifty resumes.
Debrief every loop
Write down every question you were asked and every one you fumbled, the same day. By interview four you will have a personalised version of this page that is better than this one.
Finished this round?
0 of 27 rounds read in this book