Interview Kickstart

I attended the masterclass focused on 
- Coding and data structures
- System Design and architecture
- Soft Skills and Behavioral aspects

The classes were very well structured and helpful in becoming a better engineer. It was so refreshing to focus on the basics after a long time. Mock interviews boosts up the confidence and provide valuable feedback.

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I am an experienced professional working as an EM at a financial firm who wanted to upskill and uplevel my career. I heard about IK and took the plunge finally in Dec 2021. I was enrolled for Feb Cohort and started with System Design classes. The classes were amazing and the content extremely relevant. This I did not know for sure at the time but as I interviewed with my target companies over the year, FAANG and Startups, I was asked exactly the same questions which were covered in those classes. Same for the EM Content. The job assistance I got with interview strategies and mock interviews was amazing. The only issue I had was that a few instructors rescheduled very close to or on the class date or interview date and that would mess up my whole schedule. Considering that I'm a very busy professional it was hard to sometimes get the right help in terms of interview prep when I needed it, since they would cancel and I would not be able to re-schedule the next mock before my actual interview.
Whatever mock interviews I was able to attend were good and the feedback extremely helpful.
Overall I would give 5 starts to all but scheduling. I wish I had taken this up much sooner - I feel it would have definitely helped with my career and helped me get higher salary. Read less

• 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. 

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One of the best courses I have taken by far. Everything from the Class to assignments is amazing and informative. It has helped me tremendously.
I can definitely see a level up in my professional Carrier.
I got 4 different offers in the last 3 months.
Interview Kickstart helped me a lot to understand Technical fundamentals in-depth. Read less

I got into Google with < 150 LC questions thanks to IK. Their content and the practice problems really lets you think from the fundamentals. They also provide you with sufficient amount of mock interievs with detailed feedback which helped me improve my communication skills. Read less

 I am glad that I made the right decision at the right time by selecting IK Engineering Management track. IK course boosted my confidence significantly and got a couple of offers in FAANG companies in just 4 months. Course is very rigorous & well-structured with lot of support throughout the journey in terms of mock interviews for both Technical and Leadership & Behavioral, foundation videos, Online classes & practice sessions, technical & career coaching and offer negotiations.I would like to specially call out the excellent foundation course by Omkar, in-depth system design classes by Niloy, Tilo, Data Structures & algorithms classes by Tom G by focusing on the patterns rather than pointed solutions. This pattern helped me a lot to think of the solution holistically rather than a pointed approach.I strongly suggest this course to someone who can spend more than 20hrs/week and has a strong technical and people management experience. Thanks  to IK for providing a platform to unlock the potential and alleviating the interview fear. Read less

I chose the Engineering Management IK course. In summary:
1.  It's a lot of work
2. Doing this work is necessary to get hired to a good position in today's job market
3. IK has some unique features that are a big deal

Here are some thoughts:

• 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. 

Anyway, I'm now going through interview loops from 8 companies, a mixture of FAANGs and startups. These loops can take many weeks to get scheduled, then for results from each stage of the loop to get to you, etc. I'm finding that it's important to keep only applying to additional even when in the middle of interview loops. Because nothing teaches you more about interviewing than actually doing interviews, failing at some of them and then getting better at it...
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Took a comprehensive backend engineer program. 
Pros:
1. Helped me land a job in FAANG
2. Omkar's videos are absolute gold standard and some are even better than Stanford course explainations. Perfectly tailored to crack interviews
3. Additional benefits like mock interviews and offer negotiation was just amazing
4. A couple of sys design instructors are really good and provided good templates

Could be better:
 1. Some vital material is provided only when asked for. That ideally should be provided to all candidates
2. Some instructors explainations and teaching could surely be better.

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I took this course last year because I saw a video of Omkar Deshpande explaining graphs on Youtube. His explanation of graph fundamentals was vastly different from how other interview courses describe Graph and Tree traversal-- it felt like he was actually teaching the concept and not just some stuff you memorize.

I was on the fence at first because of the price, but I've since completed the course and I feel that my algorithm design and comprehension skills have been upgraded in a major way. This course should really be renamed to "Algorithm Design Bootcamp" or something, because that's what it is.

It compresses 4 years of standard CS to a few months. The included mock interviews are modeled after FAANG interviews, so your performance will be scrutinized the way an interviewer at Google/Meta/Amazon will. But the value in that is you will also receive feedback and metrics on how to improve.

The course is split up into a few sections. The Algorithm Design / DSA section is probably the one you are interested in. It is excellent. This section alone is worth the money IMO. The other important section is Scalable Systems. This is where you learn how to design a scalable distributed system. Even if you already know how to do this, the videos will teach you the verbiage and format that FAANG interviewers expect for the System Design interview (you can use your mock interviews for this as well).

There is a heavy focus on the "why" in the classes. Omkar and instructors force you to really learn the innards of an algorithm and show you patterns that will stick in your head.

Your cohort is also assigned a support representative. Mine was excellent and always made sure my library was updated (when new videos came out) and helped me out with many of my issues. Preethi still continues to help me and be concerned with me as a student :)

Unfortunately, I took all my interviews at FAANG before I took this course. As such, I'm waiting for my retake cooldowns to expire. However, whenever I apply for a Tier 2 company or a startup, I can reasonably solve Medium level problems. And when I practice on Leetcode, I can solve previously unseen Mediums in about 40-60 minutes-- down from never being able to solve them before or taking 4+ hours randomly trying strategies because I didn't know the patterns yet.

That's why IK absolutely outperforms other programs. Nothing comes close. 

I'm very confident with Graphs and Trees just because I love them. But like many people, I am less confident with DP problems, although the section on that is very good. I know I just need to practice DP more.

There is a part of the program that is a bit lackluster. That's the practical sections (Docker, Frontend, SQL, etc). If you're a working professional already, you probably won't extract much value from those. But that's not what I was targeting to learn.

I still can't believe I'm now able to talk about A* or Prim graph algorithms in detail. My background isn't in CS so I always shied away from these esoteric algorithms. But I'm now much more confident with algorithms. Thanks IK! Read less

I joined IK to get comfortable with problem-solving. After following the course, classes, and practice material I got really comfortable with topics. I would like to highly appreciate IK operations for helping me to get back on track when I felt lost. I liked the part where you can have career coaching and technical coaching sessions. I also made use of their resume writing service. All faculties that you deal with are working with FAANG & top tech companies so you get real-time feedback of what recruiters think.
I also made use of mock interviews. This made me focus on my weak areas. Overall it was a satisfactory experience. Read less

From my experience of zero to getting offer at Microsoft and Amazon.

Pros:
1.  Training material:
- Good Detail Oriented training videos
- Good whole 1 day Weekend classes - Best
- All pre-corded and weekend classes recording available lifelong

2. Mock interviews
- Good professional mock interviews
- All interviewers are good
- Detailed feedback to improve

3. Support
- I personally could not use support effectively but its very good
- 1:1 and Group classes on demand (must utilize by everyone)

Best part which helped me get the job is because I was allowed to have my Mock interviews taken beyond support period, the helped a lot. This is the time period I needed multiple Behavioral Mock interviews.

Not any major cons. Its upto us how much we make use of it.

Suggestions for everyone,
1. Dont just rely on their training, solve 300+ leetcode questions
2. Learn from your favorite you tubers leetcode solutions
3. Improve your thinking, think like person higher than what level you are applying for. Read less

The program itself taught me many new things as I am not from CS background. The course is well structured and prerequisites before the actual class build the basics. IK has really great instructors, among them Omkar is my favorite instructor. On top of that Mock interviews with feedback are really helping to know my improvement areas. IK support team is awesome, they respond shortly. Daryl is my SSA and it’s  great working with him, he provides all the information in a short notice. Read less

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.

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I joined Interview Kickstart with a dream to join a product company . After the initial free introduction class I was pretty interested to give a shot and took the data structure course . The course is divided into topics example tree, dp, graphs etc and I was provided with a link where there was study materials and previous recorded videos of previous classes. I used to attend every weekend 4/5 hours classes where the instructor ( someone senior or manager from FAANG) used to go into details of each topic and explain . There was a homework module for each topic and also a class to discuss those .
The course provide one on one practice interview with FAANG interviewer who actually take interviews in those organizations. Those interviews helped in understanding my preparation level .
Obviously I had to put my effort the course will not spoon feed you but surely it will guide you extremely well . Read less