4 ms·

> Never think that you're blowing the interview. How do you that? Because that's all I ever think about once I mess up during interviews, and it's all downhill

• mankyd 12y ago
  If you mess up, say so: "Oh, that's completely wrong. Huh. Ok, let's fix it." Again, these interviews are more about seeing how you reason about a problem. People make mistakes all the time - wrong assumptions, incomplete solutions, etc. What matters is what you do once you realize there's a problem.
  • alok-g 12y ago
    In theory, yes. In practice, you may lose even if the interviewer is wrong. I have. At some big-name companies. Just for example, an interviewer at Apple was adamant that frequency can never be negative. Whatever happens to Fourier transform that integrates frequency from negative infinity to positive infinity. I have more examples. :-)
    • dllthomas 12y ago
      Yeah, I think I once lost out on a Google interview in part because the interviewer lacked the math to follow my reasoning (also, they were attempting to get me to a different solution by applying criteria that my existing solution already adhered to better than what they wanted).
    • mankyd 12y ago
      This may very well be, but there's not much you can do about it at that point but continue to try to fix the problem. If you can't be amicable about it with the interviewer, then either they don't want to work you or you don't want to work with them (probably both). Might as well make the best of it.
  • reledi 12y ago
    I don't have any trouble admitting I made a mistake when I notice it, it's recovering from it. At that point I think about how I messed up, what I should have done, and how bad the rest of the interview will go. In every day life, this is not the thought process I go through if I make a mistake. But in an interview the stakes are higher, you'll be quickly discarded if you don't do well.
• alok-g 12y ago
  >> once I mess up during interviews, and it's all downhill from there I have witnessed this. I was asked to write code for LRU cache [1]. I started out wrong, thinking that LRU caches "Least Recently Used" items (in other words, most recently used need to be discarded). It turns out that LRU cache "discards" LRU items. I wonder if the name is actually a misnomer. I caught this extremely quickly though on the very first hint and then tried to confirm the definition multiple times, but the interviewer had mental blocks by that time, nodding his head without even listening to what I was asking. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LRU_cache http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LRU_cache