How do you guys do it? I just had my first encounter yesterday for a data engineering job and I sincerely fucked up. My mind went completely blank, I was thinking along all the wrong lines and I think I didn’t even correctly understand the question, because there were all these words that I’ve never heard of.
How do you even prepare for something like that?
I don’t prepare, because it’s testing a task that I do pretty much everyday. If I can’t do it on-demand I don’t see how I can call myself a programmer. That said, I do have some strategies.
Often the interviewer isn’t looking for people able to recite detail in the documentation. They are looking at the quality of the code you’ll produce. So I concentrate on explaining my approach to the problem, rather than the code.
…and so on. If it’s on a whiteboard I’ll often write in pseudo-code that looks something like a language, but I’ll state that I’m not trying to write perfect, compiler ready code.
I let them guide me to the level of detail they are looking for.
If it turns out they want to score points on me for missing a bracket, or getting the order of arguments wrong, then I take that as a negative against the company. Interviews go both ways, and you’re looking for people you can work with too. So if they’re going to nitpick in an interview they’re probably going to be horrible to work with day-to-day.
Context for all of the following: I am a long time programmer who is also a hiring manager for programmers.
Interviews are not real life. During an interview the dynamics of power imbalance between yourself and the people deciding on your livelihood fuck with most people’s brains and cause them to think and behave differently than they do in real life. During an interview people are nervous, vulnerable, and outside of their element to an extreme degree.
Someone struggling to perform at anywhere near their normal level during an interview is exceedingly common and reasonable. It’s super silly to say “if you can’t perform under extreme stress that you won’t experience day to day then you just aren’t a real programmer”.
Edit: tagging @[email protected] because they should see this too.