A Two-Week Coding Interview Prep Plan for Busy Engineers

Most interview prep advice assumes you have three months and nothing else going on. In reality, a recruiter emails on Monday, and the onsite is two weeks out while you still have a full-time job. Here is the plan I'd follow with roughly 90 minutes a day.

Days 1–2: Find your gaps, not your comfort zone

Do four timed problems (two arrays/strings, one graph or tree, one dynamic programming). Don't look anything up. Write down where you stalled: was it the idea, the edge cases, or the code itself? That list drives the next twelve days.

Days 3–7: Patterns over volume

Pick the five patterns that showed up as weak spots and do two or three problems each: sliding window, two pointers, BFS/DFS, binary search on the answer, and top-down DP are the usual suspects. After each problem, write one sentence describing the trigger that should have told you which pattern to use. Those sentences are worth more than the solutions.

Days 8–9: System design or project deep dive

If you're mid-level or above, sketch two designs out loud (a URL shortener and a news feed are fine). If you're earlier in your career, prepare to walk through one project in detail: the trade-offs you made, what broke, and what you'd change.

Days 10–11: Behavioral stories

Write six short STAR stories: a conflict, a failure, a win you're proud of, a time you led without authority, a tight deadline, and a time you changed your mind. Most behavioral questions map to one of these.

Days 12–13: Full mock interviews

Do at least two mocks under real conditions: camera on, a shared editor, and someone else asking the questions. Practice narrating your thinking before you type. Interviewers grade communication as heavily as the final code.

Day 14: Rest and logistics

Test your setup, re-read your pattern sentences, and stop early. Fatigue costs more points than one more problem earns.

Tools that help

A timer, a plain editor without autocomplete, and a friend for mocks cover most of it. If you want feedback while you practice answering out loud, an AI coding interview assistant can listen to the question and suggest structure in real time. (Disclosure: I work on Linkjob AI, so weigh that recommendation accordingly; the plan above works with or without it.)

Two focused weeks won't make you an expert, but they're enough to turn rusty into ready.