I’m in the middle of sending out applications and considering all the things I should refresh on. Does anyone have some good resources or practices they run through to get refreshed or otherwise prepared for technical and skill/personal interviews?
Ex. Sites, blogs, yt videos to refresh on data structures and algorithms. Checklist of things to look for when researching companies. Questions to ask recruiters during an interview. etc.
fantasize of all the ways I can hand in my resignation.
Then 3 months go by and still no offer, lower the bar and fantasize of all the ways I can hand in my resignation - but nicer
Head over to the website of the company go to the about section and read about their values. They usually list something like teamwork, communication, working autonomously, speed, or quality. You pick 2-3 of these values and that’s what you talk about when they ask about yourself.
For the actual technical part it’s hard to prepare for. Most people don’t actually care about you being perfect but just want to see if you actually are familiar with what you said you are. So as long as you have an idea what you are talking about you will be fine.
Even if you don’t know the answer, just come up with something that could work. Don’t just say you don’t know. Explain your train of thought as to why your solution could work. And any other ideas you might have.
The interview starts … the interviewer asks me “Tell me about yourself.” … I respond “Did you receive my CV? I put all important details about me … right there. What questions do you have about my past jobs?” The interviewer encourages me again to tell him about myself, my past projects, etc. … Me: Awkward silence. … Me to myself: Dafuq? Should I read the CV from top to bottom OR WHAT?
I’d rather they ask me a question on something for which I’m an expert (myself) and that I can prepare for, than to fire off leetcode question.
Yeah, it’s a little bit redundant, but it can break the initial tension and get the conversation going. You can also use the time to emphasize some specific aspect of your work history that you think matches up with the job req, or shows why you actually want to work there.
If they don’t ask this question/prompt, what question would you want them to ask?
They’re asking not for the info, they are asking to see how you communicate (ie “soft skills”). Your response immediately demonstrates that you do not like people, are probably a PITA to interact with, and will have a hard time collaborating with any other humans who do not think exactly like you do. The good news is that soft skills are skills, and as such they can be learned and improved on.
Yes, I know this. It took me long time to figure this out. My entire life I focused on technical skills / programming / math / logic. As I deemed them most important for the job. I was like: “Hey, if you cannot program, why do you work as programmer (you stupido)?” Only few years ago I realized that even as programmer (as opposed to sales man) you really need those “meh” soft skills. And that they are really important and I should not call them “meh”. I’m very good at solving problems, improving product’s performance, memory consumption, discovering and fixings bugs, security vulnerabilities. But I’m very very bad at communicating my skills and communicating with people in general. I’m not able to politely tell people that theirs idea is bad, I just say “that’s stupid”. And I’m mostly/sometimes right (if I’m not 100% sure, I don’t say anything), but the damage caused by the way I say it is often inreversible. That post of mine about the job interview and CV was half joke and half reality. I just freeze/stutter when I’m asked something that is obvious because it is written I my CV. I’m immediately thinking “Did he not received the CV?” or “Did he not read it?” “Why the fuck is he not prepared for the call? Why are we wasting time asking me what should be obvious because I sent it in advance?” I’m more robot than human. Put me in front of problem and forget to tell me that it is impossible to solve … and I will solve it. But easy small talk … disaster. Communicating what the problem really was … disaster. Communicating how I solved it … disaster. “It was not working before and now it works fine, what the hell do you want from me now?” Yes, I’m very bad in team, in collective. I didn’t know the reason why, but since few years ago I know the root of the problem. It’s not that everybody around me is stupid and don’t know basic stuff (what I consider basic), but me unable to communicate with other humans.
One pro-tip: you can hack your own mind to work better in these situations by shifting from thinking “OMG why are he/she so stupid for doing X or Y, I would do it better” to “He/she are clearly stupid for doing X or Y, let me use my superior brainpower to guide them to achieving their goals even if they can barely understand/explain what they are trying to do”.
Talk about your strengths, a brief summary of your skills, maybe very briefly talk about hobbies, that sort of stuff. By the end of my interviews I normally have an elevator pitch mostly memorized just by coincidence of saying the same thing over and over.
A half shot of Scotch goes a long way
As long as you’re interviewing remotely, yes absolutely just a little dram to take the edge off of your nerves can do wonders.
Focus on jobs that don’t do white boarding
when you say whiteboarding do you include programming tests or take home problems?
I stay away from FAANG like companies but my experience is everyone asks them. I’m curious what kind of roles don’t - how can I keep an eye out for them?
I mean don’t bother with jobs that ask you about esoteric programming challenges or nonsense brain teasers. All questions or take home problems should be demonstrations of your ability to work with the actual material issues at the company you’re going to be working for
I agree with you. practically speaking, candidates don’t have a way to tell if the problem they are solving applies to the role, especially when bringing tour skillset to a new-ish domain.
That being said, hackerrank generates a report based on if you pass or fail. Hiring managers tend to only look at the metrics in the report instead judging the candidate based on their approach to the problem. And for code that doesn’t run, the metrics are nearly all 0. Not to mention there is no fucking debugger to step through the code and catch the 1 off index error that is common to make when you’re under pressure.
Anyway I’m beginning to rant. There are a lot of things that should be addressed but as long as someone else can solve it and the candidate pool is large, there is no point to optimize the selection process (from a company point of view). They feel as if they are getting the best candidate because they assume better experienced == better chance of passing
Hackerrank is a huge joke for so many reasons. I would rather hire a Dev whose biggest project thus far is an arduino project with 6 stars on github than looking at someone’s hacker rank
my experience with hackerrank is a company will use hackerrank platform to facilitate the online assessment - NOT look at someone “hacker rank” like you mentioned.
Candidates follows a link a company sent them and gives them an in-browser IDE to solve a problem. The platform records keystrokes, mouse events (like if you left the tab) etc etc. Then when you submit your code it is complied, executed in a sandbox, and tested with test cases. Based on which test cases pass, the execution time and memory usage, hacker rank will generate a report and fwd to the hiring team.
What I was saying in the above comment is if you had the right idea but your code didn’t compile or failed the test case, it’s as if you failed entirely. No hiring teams sits there and reads the code. Not even garuanteed that an engineer is reviewing your submission.
Hackerrank (to my knowledge) does not parse the code to determine your knowledge of algorithms, data structures, etc etc, it inferes it from which test cases passed and their execution time amd memory usage.
I usually skim the Gang of Four design patterns because that’s something people love to ask about despite it not necessarily being something folks need to memorize for work.
I think the most important thing is to think of or look up interpersonal questions like “tell us about a time you got negative feedback” and have moments ready to talk about. If someone is asking me about HTTP verbs I know a lot off the top of my head but things like that I usually have to actively think about to remember.