For Codesmith Grads: If you could do it all over again, How would you prepare before attending Codesmith?

Codesmiths curriculum spends about a week or two on CS fundamentals and then has practice for the rest of the time while doing intense project work. I also agree it’s not a single bar for what is “cs fundamentals” and that is not meant to gatekeep. Everyone learns and progresses differently. My point restated is that interviews don’t ask these questions to gatekeep but they are testing understanding of the broad abstractions that all coding is based on. The best way to do well in these interviews is to understand those fundamental abstractions and patterns incredibly well instead of understanding minimally and practicing intensely. Don’t get me wrong, part of understanding intensely IS practice. But it’s practice for the sake of understanding, not practice for the sake of trying to pass an interview if that makes sense. An example is someone might solve a LC medium problem and technically “pass” on LC, thinking that they know this problem. But the underlying code itself would indicate otherwise in a real interview, because the person is trying to get the question right over learning the fundamental concepts. u/mmz55 I edited and added more examples here. There are definitely different points of view here. I interviewed hundreds of people at Facebook, my team has hundreds of years of FAANG experience in all capacities of interviewing. This is a FAANG lens and might not apply to everyone.