5 ms·

Ask HN: Who wants to practice coding interviews together?

• csthrow42 11y ago
  Thank you for posting this. It seems it's easy to find friends to do interviews with, but it is not. When I was looking for a job, following are the services I have found. Some of these may help (not affiliated with either): 1. Pramp.com: Practice technical interviews Downside: Not very effective if you find an interviewer that is casual. Conducting interviews is a skill. The interviewer needs to have a good command over the problem and its nuances. Upside: free 2. http://Interviewkickstart.com http://Interviewkickstart.com: Full-on practice and mock interviewing. Run by a former Director of Engineering. Downside: Serious cash Upside: Very effective 3. interviewing.io: Chatroulette for technical interviewing. Run by a recruiter? engineer? Can't tell. 4. https://careercup.evisors.com/search https://careercup.evisors.com/search: Careercup used to be awesome, but it seems a bit bloated now. Hope this helps!
  • calcsam 11y ago
    Interviewing.io is a company started by a recruiter who used to be an engineer.
  • davidglauber 11y ago
    Hey csthrow42, Can I follow up with you in person? Got a related questions to ask. Here's my email: davidglbr@gmail.com
  • leeny 11y ago
    Founder of interviewing.io here. I'm an engineer who did recruiting for a few years to understand how exactly hiring is broken. interviewing.io is my attempt to fix things.
• NathanKP 11y ago
  The best way to practice interviewing in my opinion is to just do it. Go to your LinkedIn and send a boilerplate message to all the recruiters that have ever contacted you: "Hey this sounds interesting. I'd love to learn more." The next week will probably be one of the busiest of your life, but you'll come out of it with confidence in your interview skills hard earned by hours of talking with crappy companies that you would probably never want to actually work for, but are just using for interview practice. If you are in a high demand job market like NYC or SF it is likely that you will also come out of that first week with multiple job offers that you end up declining because you didn't really want to work for those companies in the first place.
  • soham 11y ago
    +1 Also realize the limitation of doing this: You'll get "practice", but you won't get "feedback". If you practice with a bunch of B and C companies, but end up getting rejected from As, then you won't know why that is happening. At that point, you may get tired of interviewing and would end up taking something that's suboptimal. So guard against that. If you want to work at an A company, then I'd say at least some of your practice interviews should also be with A companies. Even then, you won't get the raw, uncut, deliberate feedback that you want. For that, you want to practice with seasoned interviewers. Use something like us (http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com) or what Aline does (http://interviewing.io http://interviewing.io).
    • HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
      Ask for the feedback. Sure, you may not get it, but asking costs nothing and can get you something.
      • eru 11y ago
        Facebook for example is actually pretty good about giving feedback. (Google, not so much.)
• timsegraves 11y ago
  If you're wanting to practice coding interviews with someone remotely you're welcome to sign up for a free account on my site to use the collaborative editor and chat functionality. https://interviewer.io https://interviewer.io
• lazyant 11y ago
  This is an excellent idea. Browsing your site it seems you really can do the job so if I was to interview you it will be talking about those projects.
• robrenaud 11y ago
  Would anyone pay real money for technical interviewing as a service? I've done 370 SWE interviews for Google, and I think I am pretty good at it.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • soham 11y ago
    Yes! At http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com, we're always looking for seasoned interviewers. Please send me an email: soham@interviewk...
  • HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
    Contact smaller companies that may not yet have full time programmers/IT staff but are looking to hire their first programmer. Now, how you accomplish it is another problem altogether ;-) But seriously. I was trained in how to interview from a company that consults on interview practice. I'm sure the trainer mentioned that they provide it as a service, so there is an existing market.
  • quadrature 11y ago
    People are already paying real money for this. [0] http://www.careercup.com/resources#mockinterviews http://www.careercup.com/resources#mockinterviews [1] https://www.interviewcake.com/ https://www.interviewcake.com/ [2] http://interviewkickstart.com/ http://interviewkickstart.com/ If you ask me, I think its a bit ridiculous that this industry exists, But as someone who is actively seeking a job I completely understand the need for it because you get such little feedback from real interviews.
    • ljk 11y ago
      it's like people paying for test prep classes. personally I'd never pay for it since there are free books available everywhere, but looks like there's demand for it
      • 11y ago
• matthewrhoden1 11y ago
  Most of the questions in your interviews are not actually technical, unless your interviewing google or something. Here was my approach and I got a very large pay bump as a result :) Sit down and list all your projects you completed at your previous jobs. These will give you a great refresher and are going to be your talking points. Have both good and bad points ready. The bad points are for curve ball of questions like, "whats you're weak point." It will also show you can reflect and improve. Go crazy lining up interviews, that's one great thing about our industry, no shortage of companies to interview with. A few hours before each interview, look at the job description for clues. You'll pick your top three things that you feel would make you a great fit for the company based on your past experience. "Need to be able to refactor", hey that's all I did at x company for y time and of course the project was successful based on z metric. That was mostly it, of course it helps to do a quick refresher of tech specific interview questions from google. This is mostly to boost your confidence and to keep you from feeling too nervous. Good luck!
  • bduerst 11y ago
    The "I did X that caused Y, which is a percent of Z" is probably the best ways to frame your experience on a resume.
  • infinitone 11y ago
    If hes applying to engineering positions, any company worth anything will definitely give a technical interview. Practically every company I interviewed at (in TO, NY, SF, LA) had atleast a 30min tech interview or exercise. Let alone the onsite- where you are guaranteed a few tech sessions.
  • horshod 11y ago
    What kind of a job does this apply to? I and every single friend of mine that went through interviews for tech companies had to go through multiple rounds of technical interviews that mainly involved problem solving, followed by like one non-technical interview.
    • matthewrhoden1 11y ago
• antocv 11y ago
  Work on changing your attitude, an interview is not a challenge for you to succeed and surpass at. An interview is a dialog, do you really want to work for those people and with that product? Can they convince you to spend your time and efforts?
  • scarmig 11y ago
    For the life of me, I can't decipher if this comment is actually suggesting what it seems to be suggesting. There's plenty to say about technical interviewing as it exists today, but it seems remiss to suggest someone wanting to practice doing technical white-boarding beforehand is somehow undermining the process.
    • antocv 11y ago
      Practicing technical interviewing is undermining the persons ability to pass an interview. You can be 110% technically profeccient, but thats not going to get you the job. Just look at any enterprise, big name company, 90% of people employed are not technical - yet they got a job. Probably more payed than code monkeys. They didnt waste their time practicing technical questions.
• kevin_morrill 11y ago
  I would love to do this. I am a hiring manager, and would love to be on the other side of interviews myself so I can learn more. Anyone that's interested can reach out to me: kevin@mattermark.com
• fma 11y ago
  I'm close enough with my previous coworkers that I have them interview me. It's nice, because sometimes I forget talking about something and they can remind me to talk about X, Y, Z because they are familiar with my work. It seems like you are a college graduate but have enough relevant experience to ask those you have worked with before. I concur with others, too, saying to interview at companies you are not too interested in. It's as close as you can get to reality. Also, if you do get offer(s) you can use those as leverage to an increase compensation for the companies you do want. You have a lot of experience for someone just out of college - hopefully you interview at a company that recognizes your work. There are some companies where the interviewers just fires technical questions one after another, and do not care about your background. You may want to think twice about those companies before accepting. There will probably be people who balk about wasting the time of your interviewers. To them...meh. Improve your workplace so that you are not on the list of 'non-interesting' companies. This would also give your company a chance to impress a candidate and possibly change their mind and take your offer...or it will reinforce their perception of your company.