Ask HN: Dealing with Failed Interview at Google and AWS?

For what it's worth, earlier this week I massively failed whiteboarding two should-have-been-dead-easy questions. Nerves jumped up and bit me. I'm talking near total meltdown in which I complicated a task as easy as swapping two variables using a single temporary.

What can I do about it at this point? Nothing. It's a tad embarrassing, but I'm already moving on. I've finally started reading Okasaki, and am making a project out of concurrently learning Elixir and some distributed algorithms.

I'll probably fail a technical interview again at some point in the future. But behind the scenes, I'll already be a better programmer than I was at that point in time. What else can I do?

At the time, I thought I did pretty well but as I went back over the questions, I realized that I missed a lot of the sort of "tricks" of the questions that they wanted to see.

It was really simple stuff, using a hash where I should have used a trie and not seeing an edge case initially, maybe not being super efficient in a design problem. After thinking about it, the result could have been drastically different (worse or better) using a different 4 questions.

CS is a broad problem space, its not surprising to come across something that you fail at and in my mind, thats to be expected. While this time luck wasn't on my side with a few questions I didn't do amazing at, it may be better next time. Its kinda crappy how arbitrary it can seem, but I don't know if there are much better alternatives.

I have a Google interview tomorrow, so I will try my best, but also remind myself that there is a lot of chance involved.

What's interesting is that in retrospect, my current role is far more interesting and demanding on all fronts than any of the other teams I interviewed for.

It's hard, but keep pushing. The main thing that differentiates successful people from the others is persistence.

To OP: I'm really sorry that you didn't get the job you wanted. My path is not the same as yours, but I ran into rejection applying to college, applying to grad school, and applying to jobs after grad school.

In each case I felt terrible. I didn't know how to move forwards or what I was going to do, I felt like the rejection was an indictment of my self-worth.

But I think it helps to keep three things in mind:

- The people on the other side of these interviews are humans - they make mistakes and work off incomplete data. I guarantee you that they know far less about who you are, personally or professionally, than any of your friends or loved ones.

- Your self worth isn't tied to how well you do during an interview, or how many job offers you get, or whether or not your dream company gives you a job.

- Your destination - if you don't give up, you will probably end up where you wanted to go. But almost certainly, you won't have taken the path you originally set out to take. Life is filled with unforeseen setbacks and unanticipated opportunities. Proceed with an open mind and don't feel like you need to have everything figured out right away.