How do you guys do it? I just had my first encounter yesterday for a data engineering job and I sincerely fucked up. My mind went completely blank, I was thinking along all the wrong lines and I think I didn’t even correctly understand the question, because there were all these words that I’ve never heard of.
How do you even prepare for something like that?
I’ve always hated programming exercises live during an interview. Way I dealt with it typically was taking notes about it after (so that if you see something similar in a different interview later, you can be better prepared for it). Doing various interviews coding exercises helps a little too.
If you get stuck, ask for help. Explain what your thinking is, and how you plan to tackle things, and explain what help you need to solve your issue. If you get the job, your employer can work with you if they know you’ll ask for assistance when you need it - they expect to provide training or helpful oversight to any new starter. In the interview test, they are checking your basic knowledge, and also whether you are teachable.
I understand AI is really unpopular over here but for that I think it can be a good training partner.
Give it the name of the business the job description and let it work a preparation plan.
Also a reminder that sometimes we all fail interviews and that’s the nature of this exercise. And sometimes interviewer will purposefully put you in an impossible scenario just to see how you behave under stress. So remaining calm and humbly saying what you dont know or understand can be a good thing to do. I did get a job for an interview I felt I had completely failed.
Anyway don’t give up and good luck for your next interviews !
Agreed. I suggest the free tier of chatGPT voice mode as a rubber ducky - prompted something like, “ask me software dev interview behavioural questions”. I didn’t even really bother with getting input on my answers from the LLM, you can reflect on your own how you sounded. It was just good practice being asked a random unexpected question and coming up with a good response.
You can’t do much preparation since you don’t know what they’re going to ask. You can assume there will be some “basic” programming questions, but that’s really as far as you can take it in advance.
My advice here is for during the interview: keep talking. You should always be talking. That’s how the interviewer assesses you. They want to know how you are deconstructing a problem and how you want to solve it. Sitting there silent for 5 minutes and then banging out some code isn’t giving them anything.
“Ok, I need to modify this array and I should try to do that in place. I need to look up the syntax for that because i rarely need to do this…”
“I don’t remember what a splurgenarf is. Can you give me a quick definition before I get started?”
“I’m going to just slop this incomplete code in and run it once to see the output. It won’t work but I want to see if the first part is on the right track.”
“I think you’re asking me to write a wrapper around a basic network call so that it will _______. Is that right?”
Oh, and you’ll always home your first interview if it’s been a few years. Don’t sweat it, and don’t make your first interview at a place you really really want to work because of that. You need to go through a couple of interviews before your brain remembers how to function in a coding interview because it’s so far divorced from how a developer usually works.
Just remember that with challenges like that, the main purpose is to guage your problem solving skills. You don’t necessarily have to complete the challenge in time, don’t necessarily have to make it work error free, etc. They want to see how you work through it all. Don’t get me wrong, if you ace the challenge, that’s great. But they mostly want to make sure you have the fundamentals and skills to comprehend the problem and work through to a solution.
You prepare for these by doing specific exercises for them, sad as it may seem.
Leetcoding problems? You grind them out for a month or two to prepare for doing them during interview loops.
Mock interviews can help too, to get you better at handling the stress. You can use services/groups for these, or just go interview for random places you’re not necessarily planning to actually say yes to.
Sounds like it worked