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There is only one way to toughen up: Practice. Be it interviews or sports. Be it negotiations or cooking. Practice and practice perfectly. 1. Take mock intervi
by soham 11y ago
There is only one way to toughen up: Practice. Be it interviews or sports. Be it negotiations or cooking. Practice and practice perfectly.
1. Take mock interviews from experienced engineers
Go one topic at a time e.g. Recursion or Trees or DP or Multithreading etc. Before you walk into the interview, practice well. Do at least 20 problems on that topic, if not more.
2. Do practice interviews at companies you don't want to work for
Don't feel an imposter in doing this. Realize that companies also go thru several candidates before they pick one. They are normal people like you, they have a learning curve to fill the position, and so do you. Finding the right company, at the right stage of your life, is not a trivial thing to do; it's a project and needs to be managed like that.
Going thru various interviews hardens your skills of negotiation, your understanding of business models, and more importantly, gives you clarity about what your strengths and limitations are.
3. Practice the right mindset
Never go to interviews with a loaded agony of getting a job. Go simply with the intent of solving interesting problems with interesting people ("to add life to your character"). Nobody explains this better than Bryan Cranston (possibly one of the most successful TV actors of recent times): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1WiCGq-PcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1WiCGq-PcY
I make these observations based on my experience running a successful bootcamp for interview prep (http://interviewkickstart.com http://interviewkickstart.com) and also being an early engineer and a hiring manager (Director of engineering) at Box prior to that.
[Edit: specifically mentioned Bryan Cranston by name, based on the comment below]
- eric_h 11y ago> Nobody explains this better than the meth guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1WiCGq-PcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1WiCGq-PcY That clip just increased my already substantial respect for Bryan Cranston, though I feel as though calling him the "meth guy" does him a disservice. Yes, Breaking Bad brought him a great deal of exposure, but I think that even his role in Malcolm in the Middle showed how capable he is as an actor. The fact that he performed both roles excellently is also a testament to his skills. He's also won a Tony, and was nominated for a few director awards. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations_received_by_Bryan_Cranston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations...)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- noname123 11y agoThanks for posting this clip; it is surprisingly universal and applies to a lot of things outside of acting.
- mooreds 11y agoWise words: "You are not going there to get a job, you are going there to present what you do... then walk away." I think if more people took this attitude of employment being an arrangement of mutual benefit that both sides are engaged in, the world would be a better place.
- bcook 11y agoI think this could be applied to many encounters; dating seems to be the most obvious.
- onion2k 11y agoSo long as you don't use PowerPoint.
- lostlogin 11y agoIce always treated interviews as a way of getting to know a bit about the place I might work. I haven't had a whole heap but had always assumed that it was a two way street.
- artmageddon 11y ago> I haven't had a whole heap but had always assumed that it was a two way street. It absolutely is a two-way street, as you describe. When I go on interviews, I get into the mindset that I should interview them as much as they interview me. It's actually saved me from taking on a couple of bad roles.
- vijayr 11y agoThis is very good advice. The only problem with it is - he will be spending enormous amount of time practicing, preparing for interviews, and end up learning stuff that he might never use in real life. Unless he gets a dream job, I don't know if that is a great use of his time. The other option is to look for companies that put emphasis on past projects, open source contributions, take home problems etc and apply to those positions. At least this way, he can spend time making things he is interested in.
- soham 11y agoOne would think so, obviously. Most people don't need to work with BSTs on a regular basis. However, once you start practicing, a funny thing happens: assuming you're doing it the right way, with the right mindset, you start to enjoy doing those problems. Your intuition hardens and a certain level of system-design clarity sets in by seeing similar problems across topics. In some ways, that's what I'm looking for as a hiring manager, by definition: do you enjoy a problem that is new to you, but still up your alley? Do you have an urge for efficiency? Can you express your thought process and work with me to build a solution? The problems asked in the current interview process are good enough to tease these things out. Take home assignments and OSS contributions are also another credible method of interviewing, and has its own pros and cons. To see a good treatise on different ways of interviewing, see this: http://www.gayle.com/blog/2015/6/10/developer-interviews-are-broken-and-you-cant-fix-it http://www.gayle.com/blog/2015/6/10/developer-interviews-are...