The recruiter email lands and the date is seven days out. The most common mistake now is also the most natural one: opening a 500-problem list and grinding from problem one. With a week left, volume is not your lever. Specificity is.
Here is the plan we run with engineers in exactly this spot. It assumes you can code, but you're rusty on interviews. If that's not you, scale the difficulty, not the structure.
Day 1: Find out what the interview actually is
Before you touch a single problem, spend two hours answering three questions:
- What format is the round? A phone screen, an online assessment, a virtual onsite, and an AI-enabled coding round are different tests. Companies mix them, and prepping for the wrong one wastes days.
- What does this company actually ask? Recent candidate reports for your specific company and level beat any generic list. Look for patterns in the last three months, not the last five years.
- What is the bar? A Big Tech phone screen usually wants one medium problem solved cleanly with communication throughout. A startup onsite might want two problems and a working solution over polish. Knowing the bar changes how you practice.
If you can't find reliable recent reports, that's a real disadvantage. It's also the first thing a good coach fixes: at Coachable we track live candidate reports across companies precisely because knowing what's on the test is half the prep.
Days 2 to 4: Drill patterns, not problems
You cannot cover 20 topics in three days, and you don't need to. Most coding interviews draw from a small core: arrays and strings, hash maps, two pointers, sliding window, binary search, BFS/DFS on trees and graphs, and heaps. Pick the six to eight patterns that show up in your target company's recent questions and drill those.
The drill matters more than the list:
- Set a 25-minute timer and solve the problem while talking out loud, even alone. Silent practice builds a skill you will not be allowed to use.
- When the timer ends, stop. Compare your approach against a strong solution and write one sentence on what you'd do differently.
- Redo failed problems from scratch the next day. A problem you failed and then fixed teaches more than three you solved on the first try.
Ten to twelve problems a day at this cadence beats thirty solved silently in an editor.
Day 5: Take a full mock under real conditions
By day five you need a rep at the real bar: a full-length mock, live, with a stranger if at all possible, graded the way the company grades. Friends are too kind, and kindness is noise.
What you're testing is not whether you can solve a problem. It's whether you can solve one while explaining your thinking, handling a hint without collapsing, and managing 45 minutes of clock. Every one of those is a separate skill, and the mock will show you which one leaks.
This is the highest-leverage day of the week, and it's the one most people skip.
Day 6: Patch the leak the mock exposed
Do not go back to general practice. Whatever failed in the mock, spend the day on exactly that:
- Froze on the opening? Drill the first five minutes only: restate the problem, work an example, state a brute force, then improve it. Five problems, opening only.
- Ran out of time? Practice cutting to code sooner. You should be typing by minute 15.
- Buggy under pressure? Slow down your final pass. Trace your code line by line on one example before you say "done". Every time.
- Went quiet when stuck? Rehearse the sentence that buys you room: "Let me think out loud about the trade-offs between X and Y." Silence reads as failure even when your brain is working.
Day 7: Taper
The day before, do two easy warm-up problems in the morning to stay loose, re-read your one-sentence notes from the week, and stop by early afternoon. Cramming past that point trades a marginal fact for a real drop in sharpness. Sleep is a performance drug; take it.
The honest caveat
A week is enough to sharpen real skills and walk in calibrated. It is not enough to build skills that aren't there. If your gaps are deeper, the right move is a longer runway and a structured plan, not a heroic week.
Either way, you don't have to run it alone. Coachable runs intensive interview sprints built around your exact company, format, and date: private sessions with a team of Big Tech engineers 4 to 5 times a week, daily assigned work, and mocks graded at the real bar. The first session or two are free trials, and you pay nothing unless you land the offer. If your interview is on the calendar, apply now and we'll tell you honestly what a focused week looks like for your situation.
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