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?


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.