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I completely froze on a phone interview once. I opened up a co-coding application and was asked to write code to balance a binary tree as a warm-up exercise an
by tezzer 10y ago
I completely froze on a phone interview once. I opened up a co-coding application and was asked to write code to balance a binary tree as a warm-up exercise and I completely froze. Couldn't back out of my head, even with some prompting from the interviewers, and I ended up ending the phone call and writing a note of apology.
The painful part is, I used to teach CS-101 and CS-102. I assigned that exact problem to my students and have graded several hundred solutions to it.
Now I warm up on lots and lots of coding problems before I start an interview process, but I always worry in the back of my head that I'll freeze again.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoThat was a warm up question? Had they not heard of Fizzbuzz? Or reversing a string?
- jogjayr 10y agoI once froze on a warm-up Fizzbuzz. Actually it was even simpler than a Fizzbuzz: print all the elements in a list. Freezing can happen to anyone on any problem.
- tezzer 10y agoI'm a senior engineer with a ton of experience, and it was an interview for a challenging role at a major; I've come to expect that sort of thing on warm-up. It's a bozo filter before the real questions, and I should have been able to do it in my sleep.
- a3n 10y ago> I completely froze on a phone interview once. Ah, the memories come rushing back. I once froze in an interview, and force myself to blather something inane so that the phone wouldn't be silent. It went horribly. I called back later that day or the next (it's been a long time), and basically said "that's not me. I know what I'm doing!" We had a conversation about the subject that I botched. It went well in part because I had already accepted that I'd lost that job; I just didn't want to leave an impression anywhere that I was a loon. I got that job.