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

The power series definition of the exponential function is basic mathematics, and is widely used in financial modeling. This cowboy attitude towards math is just depressing.

An alternative closely related interview question that's a favorite of mine is "please compute the monthly payment for a $200,000 mortgage over 20 years at 3% yearly interest".

You shouldn't be allowed to graduate high school without knowing how to do that, and you'd be surprised how many self-described economists can't answer it.

Yes I did that in my C++ class in high school. But no I couldn’t do it now and end up with the right answer without some review. I’ve spent a decade and a half doing other things that should matter more than sword drills.

this kid wanted me to sort an array without using array.sort method in js.

that was the most stupid thing i was asked to do in my life, i had to end the interview.

i went as far as telling the founders they made bad hires. other red flags was overengineered web app, too buggy, no seo, no ogp, shit in mobile responsiveness.

their startup was defunct within 6 months, no wonder.

I stayed for pretty long time at my last company. In mean time, interview processes changed and it was all about LeetCode. I knew a little bit about it but all I thought was that it is similar to FizzBuzz problem. And I enjoy puzzles, so I thought that it would be fun.

I applied at Facebook, the recruiter tried to warn me but she also told me that since I have been programming for so long, it should be no problem. I didn't really looked at real problems, instead just tried a few examples that were there to get to you familiar with Facebook interview environment. They were pretty easy, so I was feeling very confident.

Needless to say in the actual interview, I could not even decipher problem. The interviewer helped me understand it. I was able to create brute-force solution but could not optimize it. Felt pretty dumb.

After that I looked up LeetCode, spent hours practicing it. I forgot about everything else.

Eventually, I restarted interview process. The next company I applied for was to warm up. I passed all their 3-4 LeetCode and System Design rounds. I started to feel good about it.

But I was so focused on technical aspects that I forgot about behavioral interview part. My brain was so focused on puzzles that I thought all those normal behavior questions were trick questions. I blanked and mumbled mostly. I really liked the interviewer too, I thought he had similar personality as me.

Then I went back to basics and wrote down answers to various behavior questions. And tried to revise those questions before my next few interviews. There I got still rejected but got a few offers. However, this experience also taught me that I cannot rely on my previous good luck anymore and should spend time preparing.