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I find code interviewing so nerve-wracking that I'm delaying my transition from another profession into a much-desired full-time programming job. I'm 40 and al

I find code interviewing so nerve-wracking that I'm delaying my transition from another profession into a much-desired full-time programming job. I'm 40 and always aced interviews before I did my first coding interview last year. In my prior career, I literally never had an interview that failed to result in an offer. But I blew my first coding interview both in the interview itself -- in which I repeatedly blanked out and froze -- and in my failure to show the company my best work (they asked what I was hacking on and so I showed them a half-assed blog engine I was rolling using the remnants of another project when I should have shown my more polished work.). This interview was so bad that I cannot yet bring myself to try it again, despite spending lots of time polishing up on algorithms and data structures. Up to now, I had never experienced performance anxiety of any type -- I did very well on interviews and standardized tests like the GRE. Yet now I'm petrified of programming interviews. By local standards, I'm a pretty good programmer (by HN standards I'm probably average). And what I lack in knowledge I made up for with enthusiasm and persistence. I've got a bunch of code of varying quality on Github, including small contributions to several very large open source projects and a moderately popular open source project that I created and maintain myself. I'm also limited by the fact that due to my family situation, I can only consider remote jobs at the moment. But by far my main hurdle is this fear of programming interviews. I'll definitely be taking a look at this. Maybe this will help be break through my mental block.

chrissnell 12y ago
I'm right there with you. 39 years old and I've been doing Linux systems administration and writing code since college in the mid 90s. Aced every interview I ever went to up until a couple of years ago. These Google-style coding interviews for systems/operations roles are the death of me and it's a shame. I have deep systems experience and I spend a lot of my spare time coding in Go [1] but I have little formal CS education and my full-time gig does not involve writing code all day, errrr' day. It's so frustrating, these interviews. You want to tell them, "Look, hire me and I will make your infrastructure scaling issues disappear and I'll save you money doing it" but that never happens because they see me get hung up on a sorting algorithm and immediately lose interest. I'm not looking for a new gig but I'll give their site a shot when I am. [1] https://github.com/chrissnell?tab=repositories https://github.com/chrissnell?tab=repositories
- eru 12y ago
  Pragmatically, why don't you spend a couple dozen hours drilling typically interview questions? It's easy enough to learn enough about, say, sorting in a few hours to pass most interview questions about it.
SoftwareMaven 12y ago
Don't feel bad that you blew your first interview. Unfortunately, software interviewing skills are orthogonal to software development skills, and the only time most people get experience with interviews is during the actual interviews (no pressure or anything! :). As such, you should fully expect to completely blow your first 1/2 dozen interviews (this includes your first 1/2 dozen when changing jobs after a couple of years). Go in with the expectation that you are going to fail. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, just that you expect to walk out with nothing more than an hour or five behind you. You'll find a couple things happen: first, the pressure to perform will be reduced, so you'll be more comfortable and confident answering questions; second, you'll be able to better analyze where you might have gone wrong on any given interview to perform better next time. No matter how badly you failed that first interview, you are better off now for having done it and failed than not doing it at all. The same will be true for each future interview until you land that job you want.
- thedufer 12y ago
  I have to disagree with "orthogonal". That means that there is no relation whatsoever between dev skills and interviewing skills. This just can't be true. To set the bar really low - someone who has never programmed before will never pass a code screen, while someone who has clearly has a greater than 0 chance of passing. This doesn't show much correlation, but there's clearly _some_.
  - SoftwareMaven 12y ago
    If you want to be pedantic, sure, there is some small amount of correlation there. But in the real world, I've seen people pass coding interviews who were incapable of writing software and I've seen people fail coding interviews who I knew could code circles around the interviewers. But, as usual on a site like this, being a pedant is an absolute must.
    - thedufer 12y ago
      I did not intend to be pedantic at all. The difference between little correlation and none is small on a number line but very large in meaning. If there was no correlation whatsoever, that would imply that pretty much every software company is behaving irrationally by wasting their time interviewing people - that is, simply hiring at random would be better. This obviously isn't the case.
dreamweapon 12y ago
Seriously: thanks for sharing. It really takes a lot of courage to post such an honest self-examination like that (even anonymously).
onislandtime 12y ago
Thank you so much for sharing this. Look at it this way, many companies are missing great talent because of their interviewing practices and for trying to imitate Google or Microsoft. More innovative companies (think Moneyball) can take advantage of this pool of talent and target people like you. I'm trying to think how to make it easier to identify this talent. Any ideas?
- honestcoyote 12y ago
  I personally think there's a simple answer. Give the candidate the technical questions as a take-home exercise and let them have X number of days to finish it. Probably best to have a relatively simple exercise and give them only 1 day. Sure, some, if not most, of the candidates will use Google, Stack Overflow, their old college textbooks, or whatever will help. But they're going to do that on the job too, like most of us do. The key would be to get them to explain, in detail, how they solved the problem and why they choose their particular solution, going line by line in the code if needed. I think this is perfect because it doesn't put the candidate on the spot. The shyest person should be able to work on their own, and I've never met a programmer so introverted that they couldn't explain the work they've already completed. The people who just faked the exercise by copy-pasting should be readily apparent once the detailed questions about their code arise. This is probably an overly simplistic answer but I think it would make a huge difference. In the job description, make it clear this will be your interviewing style and you'll attract quite a few of the shy-but-qualified people who would probably skip Google or any of the other high-pressure interviewing companies.
runamok 12y ago
It can be all that you described. Very humbling. My strategy was to start interviewing a lot. Don't go to your "first pick" companies first. Just go to any that look at all interesting as practice. That will take quite a bit of pressure off too. Over the course of 2 or 3 weeks I did phone screens at 20 or so companies and progressed to a code interview on most of those and then about 6 in person interviews which led to 2 offers. I never did get around to trying for my first pick companies because they are famous for dragging their feet and I was currently unemployed.
- pmiller2 12y ago
  I would like to know how you got 20 phone screens in 3 weeks. :)
peteri 12y ago
I've just got a new job after around 15 interviews[1], the technical bit I can do, the softer bits (people skills etc) are something that I need to practice and it takes a few interviews. However I did put quite a bit of effort in revising my basic coding stuff before I hit the interview trail and in general I don't apply to places I really want to work at until after I've managed to get a few trial runs under my belt. I wouldn't sweat the freezing I've done the same thing when someone asked me a question about stuff that's on my CV but no other interviewer had bothered to ask about. It should get better. [1] some failed at phone interview, others at face to face
ansimionescu 12y ago
Here's some stuff to get you started, hope it helps: https://github.com/andreis/interview https://github.com/andreis/interview
- cnp 12y ago
  Whoa, thank you!
- leeny 12y ago
  this is awesome.

chrissnell 12y ago

I'm right there with you. 39 years old and I've been doing Linux systems administration and writing code since college in the mid 90s. Aced every interview I ever went to up until a couple of years ago. These Google-style coding interviews for systems/operations roles are the death of me and it's a shame. I have deep systems experience and I spend a lot of my spare time coding in Go [1] but I have little formal CS education and my full-time gig does not involve writing code all day, errrr' day. It's so frustrating, these interviews. You want to tell them, "Look, hire me and I will make your infrastructure scaling issues disappear and I'll save you money doing it" but that never happens because they see me get hung up on a sorting algorithm and immediately lose interest. I'm not looking for a new gig but I'll give their site a shot when I am. [1] https://github.com/chrissnell?tab=repositories https://github.com/chrissnell?tab=repositories

eru 12y ago
Pragmatically, why don't you spend a couple dozen hours drilling typically interview questions? It's easy enough to learn enough about, say, sorting in a few hours to pass most interview questions about it.

SoftwareMaven 12y ago

Don't feel bad that you blew your first interview. Unfortunately, software interviewing skills are orthogonal to software development skills, and the only time most people get experience with interviews is during the actual interviews (no pressure or anything! :). As such, you should fully expect to completely blow your first 1/2 dozen interviews (this includes your first 1/2 dozen when changing jobs after a couple of years). Go in with the expectation that you are going to fail. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, just that you expect to walk out with nothing more than an hour or five behind you. You'll find a couple things happen: first, the pressure to perform will be reduced, so you'll be more comfortable and confident answering questions; second, you'll be able to better analyze where you might have gone wrong on any given interview to perform better next time. No matter how badly you failed that first interview, you are better off now for having done it and failed than not doing it at all. The same will be true for each future interview until you land that job you want.

thedufer 12y ago
I have to disagree with "orthogonal". That means that there is no relation whatsoever between dev skills and interviewing skills. This just can't be true. To set the bar really low - someone who has never programmed before will never pass a code screen, while someone who has clearly has a greater than 0 chance of passing. This doesn't show much correlation, but there's clearly _some_.
- SoftwareMaven 12y ago
  If you want to be pedantic, sure, there is some small amount of correlation there. But in the real world, I've seen people pass coding interviews who were incapable of writing software and I've seen people fail coding interviews who I knew could code circles around the interviewers. But, as usual on a site like this, being a pedant is an absolute must.
  - thedufer 12y ago
    I did not intend to be pedantic at all. The difference between little correlation and none is small on a number line but very large in meaning. If there was no correlation whatsoever, that would imply that pretty much every software company is behaving irrationally by wasting their time interviewing people - that is, simply hiring at random would be better. This obviously isn't the case.

dreamweapon 12y ago

Seriously: thanks for sharing. It really takes a lot of courage to post such an honest self-examination like that (even anonymously).

onislandtime 12y ago

Thank you so much for sharing this. Look at it this way, many companies are missing great talent because of their interviewing practices and for trying to imitate Google or Microsoft. More innovative companies (think Moneyball) can take advantage of this pool of talent and target people like you. I'm trying to think how to make it easier to identify this talent. Any ideas?

honestcoyote 12y ago
I personally think there's a simple answer. Give the candidate the technical questions as a take-home exercise and let them have X number of days to finish it. Probably best to have a relatively simple exercise and give them only 1 day. Sure, some, if not most, of the candidates will use Google, Stack Overflow, their old college textbooks, or whatever will help. But they're going to do that on the job too, like most of us do. The key would be to get them to explain, in detail, how they solved the problem and why they choose their particular solution, going line by line in the code if needed. I think this is perfect because it doesn't put the candidate on the spot. The shyest person should be able to work on their own, and I've never met a programmer so introverted that they couldn't explain the work they've already completed. The people who just faked the exercise by copy-pasting should be readily apparent once the detailed questions about their code arise. This is probably an overly simplistic answer but I think it would make a huge difference. In the job description, make it clear this will be your interviewing style and you'll attract quite a few of the shy-but-qualified people who would probably skip Google or any of the other high-pressure interviewing companies.

runamok 12y ago

It can be all that you described. Very humbling. My strategy was to start interviewing a lot. Don't go to your "first pick" companies first. Just go to any that look at all interesting as practice. That will take quite a bit of pressure off too. Over the course of 2 or 3 weeks I did phone screens at 20 or so companies and progressed to a code interview on most of those and then about 6 in person interviews which led to 2 offers. I never did get around to trying for my first pick companies because they are famous for dragging their feet and I was currently unemployed.

pmiller2 12y ago
I would like to know how you got 20 phone screens in 3 weeks. :)

peteri 12y ago

I've just got a new job after around 15 interviews[1], the technical bit I can do, the softer bits (people skills etc) are something that I need to practice and it takes a few interviews. However I did put quite a bit of effort in revising my basic coding stuff before I hit the interview trail and in general I don't apply to places I really want to work at until after I've managed to get a few trial runs under my belt. I wouldn't sweat the freezing I've done the same thing when someone asked me a question about stuff that's on my CV but no other interviewer had bothered to ask about. It should get better. [1] some failed at phone interview, others at face to face

ansimionescu 12y ago

Here's some stuff to get you started, hope it helps: https://github.com/andreis/interview https://github.com/andreis/interview

cnp 12y ago
Whoa, thank you!
leeny 12y ago
this is awesome.