I had an interview with a startup, completely owned the questions on the technical interview. When time came for the 1 - 1 interview with the CTO I had luck to ask them about their growth rate and investors. No regrets.
Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
21–30 of 130 posts
Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
#2210+ years ago I've been applying for junior ruby dev roles while still at university.
At one company they gave me a pen and a piece of paper, told me to sort an array and gave me a couple of minutes to write my answer.
I assumed I'm at command line, so I generated a rails scaffold (model, controller, view, db migrations), created and migrated the database, opened a database prompt and wrote a SQL "select ... order by" statement.
I think I wanted to demonstrate that I know rails and related tools; but I was also stressed and didn't communicate well. After looking at my answer they quickly ended the interview, told me "we'll be in touch" and I got a rejection email on my way home.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
#23I 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 Zo…
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Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
#24I was given two hours to answer two questions and to program two algorithms. I answered the two questions right. Finished the first code challenge but my tests only passed 75% (forgot some edge cases?) and the second problem I was two mentally exhausted to give a crap, so i described the solution in natural language and called it a day. I was not thrilled about the position (i had something better lined up), just took the code to see how hard it would be. It was not so hard, if given more time.
Update: first problem I solved with a breadth first search, the second was a minimum spamming tree.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
#25If you've bombed an interview in a skillset that you've done productive work in, the fault is with the design of the interview. This doesn't mean that you won't be expected to skill up in the different set to pass those interviews, but don't take it personally either way.
As an example, almost no bit of coding work is done in an environment with no reference material, no autocompletion, no compiler feedback, and no debugger, yet many companies expect people to do whiteboard interviews with syntax and language features from memory.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
#26manager at netflix told me that i used an older java version in my take home which indicated that i am not someone who keeps up with latest tech. Some dude at airbnb asked me if had gone to IIT ( indian institute of tech) and ended the interview early when i told him i didn't. This was after they flew me into sfo.
This is not an example of bombing an interview, if they wanted a recent java version they should have stated that.
Unless you chose a java version old enough to have a driving license, in which case I could understand that response.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
#27I'm unable to feel shame or embarassment in interviews anymore. Have encountered sufficient share of assholes, had enough time and hopes smashed and thrown away. If your point is to find incompetent fraud, let me be your incompetent fraud.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
#28My son was only a few months old. I had made it to the final rounds the interview process at a FAANG. He hd kept me up the night before as he had a cold I tended to take care of him in the night so my partner could sleep.
Next day I was asked all kinds of fun, esoteric questions about the C specification. That’s was hard. I was frazzled.
The final question I was asked to implement knn. Which I did brute force. And then I was asked to optimize it. And I was basically falling apart at that point and couldn’t recall a k-d tree. I blundered my way through some dead end.
This was for an engineering position embedded in an ops team. Sensing my interviewer’s frustration I asked if they’d ever have to implement knn on a page in a limited amount of time in order to bring the system back online. They said no. I never got an offer for that one.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
#29Worst interviews are ambushes. Things are going fine, you're discussing tech stuff, guy decides you need to "code" right now in an alien coding environment.
First time, guy asks me how I'd do some problem, I talk him through it, I mention there's an easy O(n^2) way but with a bit of thinking there's probably an nlogn way. He doesn't want to let me think for half a minute, just rushes me into the inefficient solution. So I do that, and at the end it's "oh I think there's a better way".
Second time I've been through a bunch of rounds, 3rd party recruiter calls me to ask to go into the office to meet the boss, to discuss terms and numbers. I get there, he wants to code some BS algorithm on a piece of paper. I do the whole thing, he finds a bug. Won't tell me what it is. As far as I can tell, he isn't a compiler. So I search around a bit, find the bug, whatever, I don't get why he can't just let it go when we've talked through the algo. So we go on, second problem, I nail it again. Again there's some bug. I tell him listen, if this wasn't on a damn piece of paper in crappy handwriting, it wouldn't be a problem. Why are you trying to hire a head of trading technology using a piece of paper and a pen?
Didn't get the job, funnily enough.
Re: Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview
#30[deleted]