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This is the biggest thing I struggle with - people confuse interview anxiety on my part with lack of knowledge or experience. You immediately look like a junior
by jmcgough 11y ago
This is the biggest thing I struggle with - people confuse interview anxiety on my part with lack of knowledge or experience. You immediately look like a junior engineer if your mind keeps going blank on technical questions (that you know the answer to) or if you downplay your own accomplishments. Interviewing feels like a crap shoot at times, because it's entirely dependent on me being able to force myself to be extroverted and confident.
However, I have a lot of respect for companies that do interviewing well (testing skill and experience in a less contrived and awkward manner), and the ones that have made the process as painless as possible tend to be well-run companies.
You can learn a lot from the process with each company, especially at an on-site. Dick-swinging contests definitely happen, which to me means that the company values rock star coders over programmers who are skilled, pleasant to work with and good at communication (and moves to the "won't accept offer" pile).
- hasenj 11y ago> people confuse interview anxiety on my part with lack of knowledge or experience Sounds like a bad excuse to me. If you get nervous on simple coding questions, how will you perform on your daily work? Unless you're applying for a very junior position, chances are your work will involve plenty of technical discussions.
- jogjayr 11y agoBecause you don't have to write code on a whiteboard with someone staring at you in your daily work. You're free to sit alone, make a stupid off-by-one error, misspell a var without feeling like you'll be fired for it. Technical discussions at work aren't so high-stakes as ones in an interview. If you do badly in an interview, you've wasted an entire day for nothing. If you fail to speak in a technical discussion at work, best case no one notices, worst case they think "Hm. Looks like Brian didn't get much sleep last night". Just the knowledge of these stakes can affect your performance.
- jmcgough 11y agoI have pretty bad social anxiety, which is never a problem in my day-to-day work, where I know and trust the (awesome) people I work with. I'm more stressed having to meet a dozen people over a very brief period of time than I am fixing a failing production server, but I do perfectly fine at the interview as long as my anxiety isn't bad that day (by the 2nd or 3rd company I've spoken with, I start to get more comfortable with it). I'm interviewing right now and all except one have lead to offers, so no, I'm actually good at my job. I'm just a better engineer than I am an interviewee.
- taco_emoji 11y agoDid you somehow skip over the word "interview" in the phrase "interview anxiety"?
- oalders 11y agoOne way which may help with the interview anxiety is just to interview more. Even if you're not really looking right now, why not interview at a few places just to work on your chops? You could also role-play interviews with friends, family and co-workers. It may not remove the anxiety, but exposing yourself to the process a little more could really help. I've had some issues with the whiteboard in the past. After I blew one interview (partially based on my whiteboard performance), I spent a lot of time coding solutions with a pen and paper, working on my penmanship (so that I could read my own writing) and just getting used to solving problems away from a screen. It really helped me get over a lot of my issues with that particular situation.
- jmcgough 11y agoThanks, I totally agree with your advice. I actually did buy a whiteboard a while back, and drilled a lot of algorithm problems, and it's helped a lot.