Interview Kickstart Reviews
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Atreyee
This bootcamp is very helpful
I came to know a lot from Interview Kickstart bootcamp. Its rigorous and very informative. The course has a lot to offer. Definitely helpful material for job search . The instructors are knowledgable and if one has no clue where to start then , they should definitely join IKStudent Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Sep 28, 2022
Hi Atreyee, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the support and guidance from the instructors useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Chandra
Waste of money..Dont wast 6400$
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I have attended the Interview kickstart SRE course and its waste of money. They have some pre-recorded videos/materials for specific topics which are some what good for Coding and System design. Remaining all materials are not useful at all. Mainly, they don't care about you once your payment is done. And, there is no way to get back your money if you are unsatisfied. Its all business with them. The cost of the course is 6400$.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Chandra, thank you for sharing your feedback with us. We are sorry to hear about your experience. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if there is anything that we can do to turn around your experience. -
G. Singh
Masterclass
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.
Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi G.Singh, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the program valuable in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Keyur Shah
Engineering Manager Cohort 2022
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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.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Keyur, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the program valuable in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Gaurav Wani
Take your career to next level
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- 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.
Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Gaurav, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the program structure and the curriculum useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Varun
One of the best courses
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.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Varun, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the program useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Emil
Great content, smartly picked problems
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.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Emil, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the program useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
KS
IK Engineering Management course review
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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.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi KS, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the program structure valuable in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Steve
Just Finishing up Interview Kickstart
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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...Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Steve, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the program structure useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. - First step is getting interviews. IK shines in this area, because IK has a lot of recruiters on their team.
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Suraj
Course review
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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.
Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Suraj, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the program useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Ibr
Back End Engineer
The course is specialized in back end engineering track.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi lbr, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the program useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Kranthi
Bootcamp
Good curriculum, knowledgeable instructors.
The mock interviews is what made this absolutely worth it for me.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Kranthi, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the program useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Rodolfo Yabut
The best algorithm interview prep on the market
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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!Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Rodolfo, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the program and the curriculum valuable in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Akshay
Course Review
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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.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Akshay, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the program useful in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Madhav Manne
Site Reliability Engineering
The course has helped in gaining knowledge on how to approach each and every specific topic. Instructors and Support team have been very helpful through out the course.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Madhav, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the program valuable in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Ronit
Good
Live classes are very well structured and the instructors take the time to make the concepts clear. Also, the mock interviews is a huge bonus when it comes to preparations.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Ronit, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the program structure valuable in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Dhrumin Desai
IK offers quality content
I joined IK in May 2021 and was able to receive 4 competitive offers in just 5 months and couple of them were from Tier-1 companies. It wouldn’t have been possible without IK’s quality curriculum and instructors.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Dhrumin, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the program useful in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Vinayak Prabhu
Zero to getting offer at Microsoft and Amazon.
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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.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Vinayak,, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the program valuable in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Anusha
IK course experience
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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.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Anusha, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the program and the support useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Alka
Excellent curriculum and student support!
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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.
Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Dec 05, 2022
Hi Alka, thank you for your words of appreciation! We are glad to know that you found the program structure and the support useful in your upleveling journey. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program. -
Pooja Ray
Software Engineer
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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 . -
Kelsi
Completely Worth It
Interview Kickstart was worth every hour and every dollar. I am now working at my dream job and it would never have been possible otherwise. -
Charlie Park
Difficult but learned so much in so little time
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I must admit that I didn't make it into FAANG or any fancy companies but that is a fault of my own for not continuing with a couple interviews I had lined up. Coming from the experience of a coding bootcamp with no CS background, it was pretty difficult learning everything I needed to in the short amount of time. That being said, the instruction was really good and I learned so much about better engineering and still apply the knowledge I gained from Interview Kickstart in problems I encounter at work. I would like to do a second run through it some time but I currently enjoy the company I'm at and the salary that they pay me. If you're on the fence, I'd say to go for it though it will take a lot of studying and commitment. If i had one negative thing to say about this program, it is that I had a difficult time understanding teachers with heavy accents but I believe this program does make you ready for FAANGlike interviews. It is up to you to follow through and make it worthwhile. -
Andy
Thank you kickstart
This program gave me the opportunity to learn and practice the skills needed to land a job in computer science that my university did not provide.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Sep 08, 2022
Thank you, for your words of appreciation. We are glad that you found the program helpful. -
Vishvas Kumar
System Design
This is course is a game changer! very focused and insightful. The quality of instructors is top class. It will help you not only for job interview but also at your job. -
prakash
Wonderful bootcamp
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Interview Kickstart offers a comprehensive program to succeed in technical and management interviews. It helps you build a problem solving mindset, offers very rich foundational material (arguably even better than what you learned in college), introduces typical interview problems, offers technical and behavioral coaching sessions and mock interviews from industry experts. The structured curriculum helps you create a plan, rather than just randomly solving leetcode problems! -
Vimal Kumar
Excellent career coaching / guidance
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@IK - DS/Algo track
- Course was well designed and structured including assignment and reviews, from industry experts
- Class session were recorded, so can revisit those, if things were not clear
- resume review with industry expert were also helpful, helped me highlight my skill in a more presentable format
- Problem solving session were also help full, instructor do explain and go over problem before solution and that clear up lot of concept and mistake a interview candidate would have made while approaching a problem
Overall experience I had was great with IK , would recommend if one is facing challenge to crack ds/algo interviews
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Saksham Sharma
Interview kickstart review
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I came to know about interview kickstart from my mentor. Before joining interview kickstart, I had solved around 450-500 questions on leetcode and I was able to reach the onsite interview stage for big tech companies but I could not crack their onsite interviews. I always felt nervous before my interviews and used to think whether the interviewer will ask the question which I have solved during my practice or not.
When I joined interview kickstart, I was impressed by their organized course structure. The foundational videos on Sorting, Recursion, Trees, Graphs and Dynamic Programming by Omkar sir are excellent. Also, I benefitted from the mock interviews and the feedback I received on my mock interviews performance. As a result, I developed confidence in my interview skills and I was able to get offers from Microsoft & Amazon. I am thankful to the whole IK family and would like to give credit to them for my success. -
Aditya
Thanks for helping interview drill!
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IK provides a great platform to organize your thoughts around interview process. It provides deep understanding of preparation complexity and time frame along with the breadth of different aspects of the interview. It teaches many value systems which are paramount to be an engineer like understanding of different designs and scale issues. These skills are mandatory in today's SDLC to be successful and make progression as a software engineer. -
Prashanth Penumarthy
Engineering Management
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Pros:
1. Curriculum was designed exceptionally well. Topics were in line with the trends expected by the high tech industry.
2. The pattern of introducing concepts as foundational material, then following by examples through live classes worked really well.
3. The live classes were conducted by professionals from the industry - this is a huge plus. As these were interactive, a wealth of valuable information was shared.
4. The quality of instruction is top notch - both foundation material & live classes.
5. Access to the instruction is available for good, which makes this really valuable. It can serve as a reference material for the entire career.
6. Up-level as a sandbox environment for the code examples is an excellent choice. All the solutions to the exercise can be archived with memory consumed and running time.
7. Up-level also archives all the instruction in a chronological order (based on time), so acts as a one stop shop.
8. The leadership workshop was very valuable. Talking to the actual professionals working in the industry gave an opportunity to retrospect, and calibrate on the attributes of a good leader.
9. It was an action packed, dynamic, high paced computer science bootcamp that was enjoyable.
10. The support period is really a well thought out idea, and is an icing on the cake. It provides a feedback loop where we could recalibrate and improve.
Cons:
1. The live system design classes could have followed a template and better time managed (part of them had an ad hoc feel to it).
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Sridevi
Data Engineer
I started with Interview Kickstart (IK) in early 2021 February to prepare for Data Engineer interviews. Immediately I liked the IK approach. In my experience, their instructors and the content are the best. I took their advice and applied for tier 3 companies and got an offer by early July. I strongly recommend IK for the tech interview preparation. -
Veera I
Great Course for Coding and System Design
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I am a current student(Developer role) of IK and here is my experience so far. The program is very well designed to crack programming interviews and it uplevels the thought process in problem solving skills.
Course layout is structured in such a way that it navigates students from basic level to advanced levels week over week.
The classroom experience is highly professional and it gave me an opportunity to meet other students in the same path, so that we can discuss with each other and motivates each other towards goal.
Their floater sessions continuously educate students on new problems and new practices in problem solving.
Overall this program helped my velocity on problem solving skills and boosted my confidence levels also.
When I attended their orientation, IK founder said that “he believes in this structured way of teaching programming concepts and system design concepts” and “he does not know that if this program does not help, what else helps. It should work”. When I go through their material, classes and problems, those words told by founder always reflect and echoes.
I wish I could have come to know about this program earlier. It is never too late and I strongly recommend this program. -
Ram
Uplevel your skillset with a structured preparation
IK has a very structured curriculum with great faculty who can guide through the interview process at top tier company. It is always great to have options to choice where you want to work. -
Amol K
Comprehensive Interview Prep!
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As an experienced Engineering Manager, I was very skeptical of any interview prep courses. After all, I interviewed people for a living. However, after a few unsuccessful attempts, at a couple of FAANG companies, I realized that I needed some help in building a structured approach towards preparing for interviews, specifically for the technical rounds. I had not been actively coding in the recent past and needed to devote time to brush up on data structures and algorithms and recognizing patterns to solve problems in a systematic manner. After researching all available options for prep, I settled on Interview Kickstart and I am glad I did! For sure the course is not cheap, but having a structured curriculum with in-person instruction and a cohort of students that I could discuss problems with was invaluable. It definitely required a lot of time commitment from my end as the course was really fast-paced, but it kept me disciplined and time-boxed my preparation. The curriculum is very comprehensive and laddered well. Some of the instructors, especially Omkar Deshpande, are fantastic and they really helped me recognize patterns for tackling coding problems and build an approach towards solving them. The mock interviews were also very essential in practicing for the system design problems.
On the flip side, there is also room for some improvement. The quality of instructors can vary, but for the most part they are pretty good. The virtual classroom setting (as I did the course during Covid) with a lot of students, is a bit limiting in terms of interactivity and I found myself with questions sometimes that I had to follow up later on. The user interface could also use some improvement as I could easily bookmark favorite sessions or annotate videos for faster reference later. I would also have preferred more practice problems or link to other practice problems in Leetcode (or other online prep) for each of the sections.
Overall, I would still recommend this course for anyone who is serious about preparing for technical interviews. -
Forrest
Online interview course
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Interview Kickstart is a really good place to start to improve your interview skills as a software engineer.
Short description:
if you failed many interviews before, or have no idea what's wrong, this is the right place to start.
Long answer:
Success rate:
I don't know the real success rate. They said it was 99% but I doubt it. From my batch, porbably 20-30 people, I know at least 2 guys got the offer (from the discord channel), I also got an offer (so at least 3), but I did not write anything there. So I guess there were more people got offers.
Community:
There are two places you can discuss. One forum and one discord channel.
The Forum is kind buggy, especially when you go there through email links. Some questions are posted and answered by students but they are not very active.
The discord was somehow more active. Usually those who were very active would input some messages in discord. But TBH, the channel was not that active. Usually I use discord to contact the IK operations for support. The support were slow sometimes, but they would get to you.
Courses:
Part of the courses are videos only, Part of the courses are live. The course quality is extramely good. I do recommand those.
Mock terviews are also very good. They have a lot of interviewer from different companeis. Most of them are good, but I did meet one interviewer that was pretty bad and didn't give good comments. But it's rare case. Sometimes you would meet an mock interviewer that was not very experienced, but it looked fine to me. I got one referral from one of the interviewer and got the offer.
Other support:
There are a lot of supoort. I did not use a lot of them. I knew there were coding support, Leet code problem, and behavioral interview, compensation negotiation, resume suggestion, etc. You can find one appointment and talk to them in a reasonable time.
Cost:
I took the full course, it cost like more than 6k. Is it worth it? IDK. I got an offer for 200k+ so I think it should. And you have 15 mock interview chances. The materials are usually up-to-date, (at least within 2 years). So I think this one is reasonable. I think they also have policy to refund partial of it if you were not hired. -
Vijay K
Essential skills for attending today's interviewing landscape
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After 10 years of stint at my current job, I wanted to apply for a new job, but looked at the landscape of the interviewing process, and it changed over the last 10 years dramatically. I spent some time in leetcode solving problems, and it was never enough without having a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts. As I was exploring options to improve my skills, I luckily came across Interview Kickstart, through a referral of my ex-colleague and joined without hesitation.
The master class material videos are top-notch and goes into very basics of why things are done one way vs other and that helps to get ready to face questions that one hasn't come across. Even though it's only 8 classes (some classes going well over 7 hours), the course is very intensive and needs extra time to internalize. Social media related System design problems are very new to me, and the template Interview Kickstart uses to peel it away helps tremendously. The best part of the course is mock interviews, and they really help finding smaller mistakes that one wouldn't pay much attention to, and it's an iterative process.
Thank you IK! -
Cam Martin
Best coaching to become a good engineer and clear tech interviews at FAANG
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Once the course material is covered by a student, clearing an interview will become a byproduct and the student is bound to become a better engineer to perform a software engineering role. A student will not only end up solving about 250 to 300 coding questions across various topics but also learn how to approach any coding problem from scratch. Any session taken by Omkar Deshpande is brilliant and starts from the fundamentals. The technical coaching sessions, mock coding interviews strengthen your interviewing skills and remove interviewing jitters. The support staff is great and overall this program provides great career coaching for Engineers aspiring to work at FAANG companies. -
SB
Coding Bootcamp Review
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The interview preparation course at IK is very relevant and comprehensive. Here are few things I liked about it.
1) Content: It's current and very relevant. The course operates on 80-20 strategy. While it focuses on 20% of content that matters in 80% of the interview scenarios, it also provides support to student who want to explore more through floater and coaching sessions.
2) Instructors: They know the stuffs that they teach really well. They are very engaging.
3) Operations: They are there for your success. Each of the students are assigned an SSA (Student Success Advocate) who guides students throughout the period. And they are good at it.
4) Beyond coding: There system design goes through fundamentals to advance topics currently asked in interviews. They are even more useful if you are applying for levels seniors and above. They also have some really good content on behavioral aspects of interview such as offer negotiations, resume, and linked in profile guidance, etc.
Though the program contents are really good, it does not guarantee a job. Here are some strategies that I personally believe a student can do to get the best out of the program.
1) More you put in, the better you are. The program is not a silver bullet in itself.2) Mock interviews: Mock interviews are taken by engineers, engineering managers, leaders, and executives from top software companies. I have found there reviews very helpful. Iteratively, I have been personally able to improve a lot by addressing feedbacks from previous mocks.
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Dolly
Super Comprehensive Experience
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I had a great experience with IK. The instruction was online since my cohort started in Feb 2020 when the pandemic had just taken hold. I really wish it could have been in person, but it was still a great experience online.
You can watch live lecture and ask questions, as well as review old lecture videos. Because it was for material that I hadn't covered since college, I had some difficulty and had to watch lecture videos multiple times. What was also helpful was the office hours.
They had coding office hours, as well as a lot of drop-in slots for other counseling services to help you with your experience.
These really helped it feel much more structured. I even took away new methods of goal-planning during career counseling sessions, thanks to Fanny.
My one other nitpick was that as a data engineer, the program was a little overkill on the coding side in my experience, and not enough data engineering specific questions. However, I know that IK now has domain-specific programs so I would definitely recommend, especially if you hadn't gotten the chance to truly do ETL work for a while despite having a DE title (it happens!) -
John Baek
I got a job from Google using IK
I got a job from Google using IK. I really like their curriculum. The student support is the best. You get the full support from the beginning to the end.Student Success Advocate of Interview Kickstart
Student Experience Team
Sep 27, 2022
Hi John, thank you for your encouraging feedback! We are glad to know that you found the curriculum and the support from the team valuable in your journey during the program. Please feel free to reach out to us at operations@interviewkickstart.com if you require our support on anything related to the program.