Try practising speaking your ideas and approach out loud. This may do two things, which reinforce each other: giving yourself momentum and positive vibes as you say things you know are right and leading you forward towards the answer, and building a clearer idea of your skills and manner in the minds of the interviewer. In effect, you are trying to turn the liability of the audience into an asset.
Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
51–60 of 129 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interviewers are very bad at accounting for this. For example, there is almost no engineering question on the planet that people straightforwardly solve from first principles in 30 minutes, unless it’s totally shallow based on memorization or childish rote practice — and has virtually zero relationship to how they would ever solve any problem at work. But there are all kinds of insanely hard problems that people can…
>Seeing “how someone thinks” in an artificial 30-60 minute session only tests a completely separate and mostly unnecessary skill set Totally agree. However, what's a good alternative? A company can't hire everyone for a trial week, and a candidate can't work a trial week for every company. It's really hard to design a hiring process that is efficient for both parties plus resistant to abuse.
They can ask probing technical questions about past work experience, projects and education. Pretty much like how every other industry interviews people.
You are right that interviewers won’t get much more than an hour to judge a candidate. So why waste it on information that fundamentally can’t be helpful (like whiteboard trivia)?
Instead, first jump right into a domain where the candidate should already be comfortable and technical — their past work projects — and go from there, probing for more technical depth.
The idea that it somehow makes more sense to use limited time by wholesale discounting & ignoring the person’s previous work history in favor of having them write a sorting algorithm in CoderPad is totally indefensible.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#53Coding interviews is a performance-based art, so treat it as such. The best way to prepare for an on-stage performance? 1 Memorize your lines until you can't forget, 2 practice with fellow actors, and then 3 practice with real interviews. 1+2 is practice. For step 3, concentrate on improv & how to compensate for when you're not at your best (aka you didn't get great sleep so you forgot a line - what do you do?)
Same for coding interviews. Practice, then interview. 5-10 years down the line, every time you're looking to switch jobs, it gets easier, and you get the insights from the past experiences.
NB
The phone screen isn't easier than on-site; it can often be harder, and often is the same level of difficulty, with more pressure.
NB 2
If you're mid-level they'll ask a few systems design questions. Make sure for the systems you've built, you know at a high level how each individual component was built and what abstraction it stands for.
Good luck! And ping me at my tw email (check profile) if you want to follow up
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#54you don't want to blame the process, yet you admit it brings you down every time you fail and makes you doubt of the already proven ability you have as an engineer, and the process is ok?
Your answer is not helpful on several levels and you might even know it.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#55> But each failure kind of brings me down, and makes me think that I'm a bad engineer First off, you are not a bad engineer for failing a technical interview. Over the past 3 years, I've applied for hundreds of roles across dozens of companies. I've been through dozens of interviews and I've got offers from (or worked at) Uber, Twitter, Microsoft, Tesla, etc. The side of the story I don't focus on is that I've had ov…
I commend what you did and where you're coming from but going through 200+ rejections is just soul wrenching, and it's probably not what the OP wants to hear. Something is very wrong in this industry if its hiring practices are so that someone competent needs to go through that many interviews (and rejections) before finding work.
> going through 200+ rejections is just soul wrenching
Yeah I've been through this many rejections total, and some of them have been pretty tough emotionally, but it only takes 25-50 before landing another really cool job I've been excited about. 200 rejections is pretty soul wrenching, but getting the other big companies on the resume makes it more than worth it.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#56Practice on interviewing.io
I conduct interviews on interviewing.io so I'd just like to add some clarification on this advice. You don't get unlimited interviews so it's best used for interview practice, not coding practice. If you have trouble with the technical parts (sorting, trees, etc), you can learn that on your own from books/leetcode. Once you're confident in your coding and CS fundamentals, use interviewing.io for the aspects of interviewing that you can't learn from leetcode: gathering requirements from the interviewer, explaining your thought process, staying calm under pressure, time management, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#57Before this discussion starts between how the interview process sucks. Here is my 2 cents: 1. Pick up leetcode (or whatever rocks ur boat). 2. Do a lot easy questions and understand the pattern. 3. Do medium level questions and understand the pattern. 4 If you are aiming for Big 4 do Hard. Coding interviews is all about finding the pattern and applying it. Only way to be good at it is practice. Don't give interviews…
Anyone has any top list in terms of most interesting/creative/fun? Because, I find most of these tasks quite boring - even if the solution is not clear from the start, it just feels too contrived and you know that it's aimed at some particular algorithm and the data structure.
I am really enjoying working through the book "Elements of Programming Interviews"
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am interested in how you've managed to apply to multiple roles at the same company? is this across 3 internship seasons? A lot of companies will list the same roles across different teams. Applying to (or interviewing with) all the different teams helps your chances. I'm at Tesla right now and I applied for 15 different roles over the span of 3 years before they gave me an offer.
but do you interview with the same company multiple times per season? isn't that like cheating? like taking basically the same test e.g. 10 times?
Yeah, it's exactly like taking the same test multiple times! I recommend it :) In my experience, this only happens in the same season if it's the recruiter's idea. Google did this with me one time. The recruiter knew I just got rejected interviewing with one Google team, but she was incentivized to put me in the interview track with another team so I got two shots.
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#59>there's also extreme examples like the inventor of homebrew that got rejected by google because he couldn't reverse a binary tree. HN has rehashed this debate plenty, but I don't think you should necessarily see this as an example of a dramatic failure of the Google SWE interview process. Homebrew became a success due to great vision and execution, not because it solved a challenging technical problem. Howell seems…
> Howell seems like a great guy who would probably make a great senior developer, founder or PM at any company that aims to solve customer needs. Google's focus, however, is on hiring SWEs that can solve uniquely complex and difficult technical problems. Huh? Isn't all difficulty in software complexity management? Isn't writing a package manager a sufficient demonstration of that? What's a "difficult technical proble…
A difficult technical problem, for example, is Google search. It's not just managing the completely of PageRank, it involves creating fundamentally new algorithms to deliver better search results.
Another way to think about it is that Google wants SWEs who can also act like researchers (e.g. PhD students).
Re: Ask HN: How to not fail on coding interview questions?
#60I honestly feel you’ll get horrible advice from HN. Many here feel too strongly about the process itself to give objective advice, as almost everyone here has probably been screwed over for no good reason at least once.
What’s your goal? I assume, get a new, higher paying job. What’s the barrier? Interview style coding problems, apparently.
So, things that will help you achieve your goal (IMHO):
- Buying and reading cracking the coding interview
- practice solving problems on sites like hacker rank and leet code
- when you practice, try simulating interview conditions. Use pen and paper or a whiteboard if your interviews will involve that
The more familiar and mundane the problems become, the less likely you are to feel nervous with an audience. Just practice the problems until it is like tying your shoes.
If asked to tie your shoe with someone watching, would you be so nervous as to be unable? If so you may have some serious anxiety issue you might want to work on before starting a job search.
Things that definitely won’t help you achieve your goal:
- ruminating on life’s injustices
- ruminating on your own shortcomings
- comparing your self with others
- ruminating on the decidedly capricious and error prone hiring practices of Silicon Valley companies.
Life is not fair and there is a time and place to think about those things. But doing so is counter productive to your goal, so I wouldn’t recommend it at the moment.