Question: 'Estimate the number of cups of tea consumed daily on your university campus.' 1. State clarifying assumptions (campus student population = 6,000; hosteler vs day scholar split = 80/20). 2. Segment by user personas (non-tea drinkers = 30%, light drinkers = 1 cup/day, heavy exam grinders = 3 cups/day). 3. Add faculty and canteen footfall. 4. Sanity check with canteen vendor batch sizes. Interviewers care about structured logic, not the exact number.

Never charge hourly when starting out — clients will question why a bug took 3 hours to fix. Charge per project milestone: - Milestone 1: Wireframes & visual designs in Figma (30% upfront) - Milestone 2: Functional staging deployment (40%) - Milestone 3: Production domain launch & handover (30%). Never deploy to their live domain until the final payment is cleared in your account.

Every company asks at least one SQL question in round 1 or 2: 1. 2nd highest salary using `DENSE_RANK()` vs `LIMIT OFFSET` 2. Employees earning more than their managers (self-join) 3. Duplicate emails / usernames (`GROUP BY HAVING COUNT(*) > 1`) 4. Customers who never ordered (`LEFT JOIN WHERE IS NULL`) 5. Cumulative monthly revenue (Window function `SUM() OVER (ORDER BY month)`). Master window functions and self-joins!

Classic computer architecture experiment: Iterate over 100,000 integers and conditionally sum elements > 128. If the array is unsorted, the CPU's branch predictor misses 50% of the time, stalling the instruction pipeline. If the array is sorted, branch prediction accuracy is ~99%, and execution runs 6x faster. Understanding hardware mechanics makes you a dramatically better programmer.

1. The 3-5 close friends who will pick up your call at 3 AM ten years from now. 2. The ability to learn a completely new domain from scratch in two weeks without getting overwhelmed. 3. Your health, emotional resilience, and communication skills. Keep your GPA above the eligibility cutoff (usually 7.5 or 8.0), but don't sacrifice your youth and friendships chasing a 9.8.