I just recently accepted a SWE offer after 3 months of unemployment. The internet is teeming with tips on crushing technical and behavioral interviews but here’s four things I noticed that don’t get talked about as much.
Prepare to be Dumber
You should expect to be about 10-20% less intelligent, coherent, and articulate in your interview than you are practicing on your own. Real pressure is difficult to simulate in a practice or mock interview so it’s a variable you can’t really coach yourself out of but it is something that you can prepare for. If you understand a concept like the back of your hand, it’s unlikely you will completely blank on it in the interview. If you just barely understood it the first time, you’re unlikely to be able to explain it under real interview pressure. Overcompensate in order to be prepared for that pressure.
Speak Up
This is actually not an uncommon piece of advice but I want to take it a step further: explain yourself out loud every chance you get. Every time I learn a new topic, I spin my chair around and imagine I’m explaining it to a person who knows nothing about it. Don’t wait until you finish an entire section on graphs to explain how Dijkstra’s differs from Breadth First Search. Explain it out loud as soon as you learn it. It’s a great way to solidify your understanding and it also give you a mental hook to latch onto in the future.
Pick your Battles
This one may be controversial but I feel like it’s important to be realistic: you have to pick your battles. Most software engineers understand the pain of having to re-learn DS&A concepts after being in industry for a few years. It is a grind if you haven’t been keeping those skills sharp. The unfortunate reality is that there is a limit to how many hours I can practice/study in a day and a limit to how much I can learn before my next interview. You have to use your best intuition to determine what makes sense to learn first and what to hope you don’t get asked. There were many times where I’ve had to say “If they choose to ask me a 2 dimensional dynamic programming problem, I’m just not going to be able to do and honestly, that’s okay”. Very few people can hold all this specialized knowledge in their head at all times without consistent practice. Decide what’s important in the moment and decide what you can save for next time.
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over
There were multiple interviews that I was sure I aced that resulted in automated rejection emails. There were even one or two that I thought I flunked that I moved forward in. When I was at Google, I told students during career events all the time that “getting the answer right” is just part of the battle and arguably not even the most important part. Hiring decisions are made using multiple factors that you can’t see. Don’t count yourself out or assume you got the job based on your interview perception.