I was recently at a job interview for a position related to Angular and C# development. After a few questions about design patterns and CSS I was finally asked to code something. I was never one to dislike technical interviews, even the whiteboard ones. Because I know that interviewers value the thought process more than the actual result. I know. I’ve been there.

But what surprised me was that the task at hand had nothing to do with Angular or C#. Instead it was a traditional interview question regarding anagrams.

So the interviewer asked me to code a function that would check if two strings are anagrams of each other.

The strategy when faced with a task like that is to first ask your interviewer some questions that you may have regarding the problem. If you don’t have any questions it’s always nice to repeat the problem back to your interviewer. Remember, they’re not just after your impressive coding skills, they want to see you’re equally able to communicate, an area in which quite a lot of developers are inferior.

After showing that you can communicate effectively, it’s time to analyze the problem. Again it’s imperative that you think out loud. If you sit silent staring at the keyboard, or the white board depending on your situation, two things will happen. First, you may be synthesizing the most architecturally and algorithmically perfect solution based on your impeccable skills and incomparable experience, but the interviewer might as well think that you’ve frozen. So, again, communicate. The second thing that’s gonna happen is that if you haven’t figured out the solution, anxiety will eventually cripple you. By talking you get your brain to start thinking. You can’t go from “completely frozen” to “devising the perfect algorithm” just like you can’t get your car from stationery to running at 200km/h in a second’s time.

Don’t attempt to arrive to the optimal solution on first try. Start by finding something that works. In the case of the anagram problem, the first possible solution that I mentioned was to create a “dictionary” for storing each letter in each word along with the number of times that the letter appears within the word. So of we have the strings “baba” and “abba” the we would have two equivalent objects like this:

Literally five seconds after recommending that solution to the interviewer, an actual better solution came to my mind. I would sort the two strings and then compare them. If they’re equal then we have an anagram.

The final touch that I added was an initial check of the strings’ lengths. If the strings don’t have equal lengths then we can immediately return false because we can be absolutely certain that the strings are not anagrams of each other.

The final algorithm after optimizations looks like this:

A fairly simplistic approach with chained calls to split, sort and join to enhance readability.

That’s it for today. I hope you found this answer to a common interview question helpful. See you next time.