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Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

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Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

#11

Post by throwaway57273 »

I left my job in 2021 to create a startup that raised $6-7 million and in late 2022 I exited for about $2.5 million. I wrote about half or more of the code. I consider myself a very proficient full-stack engineer and I know typescript, react, databases, and Rust, among other things. Over a decade of experience.

I’ve since decided to apply for two different software engineer jobs (since I don’t want to make another company yet) and didn’t get an offer for either. No idea why but I think it has to do with the technical interview. On one I didn’t even get past the first screen.

I amusingly find it harder to get a good software engineer job (let’s say which pays $200k+) than to create a company and raise millions (at least in the bubbly 2021 market). The technical interviews are just ridiculous and almost feel like a mild form of harassment. It’s like just because I don’t ace whatever esoteric code exercise they come up with, I’m ineligible for the job.

Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

#14

Post by 1attice »

geraldwhen wrote: post #4
1attice wrote: post #2

I, a React developer, took three months off developing in React, only to forget how `useEffect()` works when you pass it no dependencies (vs when you pass it an empty array.) Idea: Build a map of things that are easily forgotten and treat it as a map of places where the API needs improvement. (Following ye olde Law of Least Surprise. Thanks, Larry Wall!)

The fact that it’s unintuitive and different is why hooks are a joke. Class components just make sense.

TBH I disagree, I prefer strict functional programming, mostly for composability. Class components feel like translating everything into latin numerals and then back out again.

Hooks help me avoid that pain. But is the API perfect? Nope.

Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

#15

Post by zinckiwi »

geraldwhen wrote: post #4
1attice wrote: post #2

I, a React developer, took three months off developing in React, only to forget how `useEffect()` works when you pass it no dependencies (vs when you pass it an empty array.) Idea: Build a map of things that are easily forgotten and treat it as a map of places where the API needs improvement. (Following ye olde Law of Least Surprise. Thanks, Larry Wall!)

The fact that it’s unintuitive and different is why hooks are a joke. Class components just make sense.

I never had a problem with the explicit lifecycle methods in class components, and the concept of a functional component effectively being the render method in isolation. To me there’s only one clear advantage to hooks and that’s sheer reduction in raw lines of code. Having said that, it’s a pretty huge advantage for something like redux.

Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

#16

Post by emehex »

I found myself interviewing with a hedge fund last year because they liked some of my open source stuff (and approach to API design)...

I had about six conversations with a bunch of the team and a conversation with the CEO to sell me on the position. The last step was a seventh “conversation” with the Chief Data Officer to figure out if this was something I really wanted.

The CDO had different ideas… he joined the Zoom, started sharing his screen (with no introductions), opened a Google Doc and told me we were going “write some code together”.

I was pretty confused and flustered but tried to roll with it. He first asked me to “reverse a string”. OK. My lil Python snippet was fine but he didn’t like that it wasn’t “the most memory efficient way to do it”. He then asked me to write a function to approximate “e”. I just ended the interview right there.

Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

#17

Post by joncfoo »

1. I froze during a whiteboard interview where I was asked to pretty print a tree in front of two people. Performance anxiety made me implode and stumble so much that I failed to implement basic recursion :')

2. I froze again during a live coding interview when I was asked to correct code under test for a coin change problem. I couldn't get over the fact that someone was judging me based on what they were seeing live and I messed it up so badly that I told them I'm not good at live coding and left it at that >_FFS after ~15 years in the field having worked on firmware all the way up the stack one would think I'd be great at throwing out solutions to trivial problems off the top of my head...nope not my brain :D

I've found for myself that there's a massive difference in how someone approaches live coding. If it's a colleague or even my entire team I know that we are doing this together because we have a common goal and will support each other...unlike in an interview where it's set up to be antagonistic and that throws me off completely.

Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

#18

Post by 1attice »

undefinedzero wrote: post #6
1attice wrote: post #2

I, a React developer, took three months off developing in React, only to forget how `useEffect()` works when you pass it no dependencies (vs when you pass it an empty array.) Idea: Build a map of things that are easily forgotten and treat it as a map of places where the API needs improvement. (Following ye olde Law of Least Surprise. Thanks, Larry Wall!)

I, a React developer for ~8 years, don’t really remember what useEffect does without the second param. I never needed it, so I forgot. I almost feel it should be a required prop, and I doubt that that knowledge alone would fail or pass an interview.

One of the things about React is that local codebase conventions really influence what parts of the API are high-touch for you.

I too have been coding in React for that long (precisely that long, oddly enough ;D) and I used `useEffect()` in pretty much everything I was doing.

There are reasons for this that are local to the project I was on for most of that time.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure my embarrassing confusion cost me the interview in question.

Coding is a lot like playing a musical instrument, or singing. Without daily practice, you get musty. You can scrape off the must in a matter of days or weeks, but in the meantime, you can be expected to bomb any audition.

This is why it's so good to have something on the go on GitHub. It's not about the star-count, it's about keeping your hand in.

Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

#19

Post by mistymountains »

I interviewed for an ML scientist role (remote) while I was feeling a bit under the weather. I got through to a round with the founder/CEO and things were going well. However, this was a few days later and I was beginning to feel not so good, lots of brain fog and fatigue. The interviewer asked me a fairly basic question about a certain module and why one would use it and what the effect would be with given parameters. I sort of dropped the ball and said something reasonable but not super rigorous, and I could tell the interviewer wasn’t very satisfied.

The next day I took a COVID test and it was positive. I should’ve postponed the interview as soon as something was off but it would be weeks until I felt better. I ended up getting a better offer at a better company but it still hurt to be rejected at least in part because I wasn’t feeling 100%. Live and learn.

Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

#20

Post by mattrighetti »

Definitely bombed my very first interview.

After sending almost 150 CVs I had the opportunity to schedule a call with a manager at Apple for an internship, this was supposed to be the classic "get to know each other for a couple of minutes and then talk about how this is going to work".

Everything was fine until the manager asked a very basic problem (checking if a sudoku solution was valid), I did not expect a coding question during this very meeting so I was very nervous at the time and messed up.

They told me that they had found another candidate for the position saying that they do first come first served. I don't believe a single word of it, they took another candidate just because I was not good enough during the coding part and that's okay!

Moral of the story: don't believe what they say about the interview that it's going to take place, don't make assumptions, just be prepared for everything that could happen.

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