Cover photo by Mark Rabe
When I was asked to present to high school developers on the subject of technical interviews I did what any professional...
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I have mixed feelings about this article. On one hand, I enjoyed reading it and I'm glad you share your thoughts with us. On the other hand, I'm freaking out at the idea of going again to a job interview.
I've had this job for so long, I'm used to work alone from my room, without talking to people and solving specific kind of problems. I mostly google and copy / paste stuff. (yes, I am still the kind of guy that checks mdn whenever has to use something like
array.reduce().).There wasn't a reason for me to learn a lot of stuff that are necessary in an interview and I keep asking myself if I'm actually a software engineer or just an imposter...
The company I worked for recently lost a dev to Amazon. I was chatting to him a bit before he left, and I asked him what prompted him to apply, and he said his goal going in was just to find out what the interview process was like - he had no intentions of working there. That all just followed after.
It just had me thinking - going into interviews with the goal of learning has always calmed me down immensely. Maybe that would help you as well?
Also, I'd have to check MDN for
reduce()for the details as well. I think, so long as you know what the function does, that's just fine!I've actually heard similar advice from companies when prepping for an interview. They suggested that I interview at other places so that I could learn and get some experience doing it! It was a surprise to hear that but it really made sense.
At some point I think most of us have felt like an imposter and that's ok. As long as you choose to continue learning you'll become a better developer.
Also, I look up stuff all the time! We're people and there's no way of us remembering what each method does all the time :)
Maybe I'll set up starting with January and go to some random interviews, just to learn and be rejected. (I guess that's a lesson too)
I figure: A) there's entirely too much shit to know cold/off the top of my head; B) I switch far too frequently between different types of tasks, languages, etc. to have much more than "most recently used" techniques/languages at the top of my head. If all a place is looking for is solving an immediate problem, I'm probably the wrong person for the job. If they're looking for someone who's going to be capable of long-term problem-solving, they're not going to be hung up on me not immediately-knowing something but will, instead, be happy to see that I know how to use what I know to extend my knowledge to the particulars of a given situation.
But, yeah, I've never considered myself a specific subject "expert" ...even when the people that have advertised themselves as experts have demonstrably-less knowledge in their domain than I (down side of being aware of how much you don't know).
That's what I'd like to believe about myself too. I've always been the last one in the company, and therefore I had to learn whatever was needed. Like this, I got to work with 6 different languages and yet I didn't get the chance to get good at any of them...
I guess there's an upside to this too, I just didn't see it yet.
Hi Kiara, I really love this article thank you! I'll share it for sure, it's exactly my thoughts on this topic.
Have a nice day :)
Thanks so much Maxime! I'm glad you loved the article. Hope you have an awesome day :)
Some great tips here!
Thanks Andrew!
Whew! It's encouraging to read this, since this is exactly how I approach technical interviews as an interviewee.
Meanwhile, as an interviewer, I can definitely confirm that this is right on.