Hi Fellow Devs!
I am a silent reader and follower of dev.to till now. The thing is I have been working in web development for one and a half year now. I have worked in Laravel, Ionic (framework to develop native apps) both versions of it, AngularJS and the latest angular. The thing I am trying to say is in the last year and a half even though the experience is not that much I have worked on many things, when I check job requirements many of those have points like:
you must know to work with socket servers or ports.
you must know to work on highly scalable apps with million of users.
This is my first job. I got into this company as an internee and the reality is I have never given a real technical interview. I have this feeling that I don't know enough and when I will give interviews that it would go bad. Is it only my feeling or is it mutual? Also according to my experience the requirements mentioned in the jobs do I need to learn them at this point for further jobs?
If anyone could discuss these that would be great.
P.S This is my first post ever, so apologies if I wrote horribly.
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Top comments (12)
I remember my first technical interview very clearly. I entered a dimly-lit office with bare concrete walls and floors. Everybody there looked like they were counting down the minutes until they could leave. I sat at a pop-up table and a crusty-looking man with a cane sat down across from me. In his hand he had at least five pages of interview questions. He handed them to one of his employees, muttered a few gruff instructions, and ten minutes later he was fast asleep on his chair as the employee read the questions aloud.
The questions all sounded something like this:
"Can you explain the interaction between XEP and YAR/TR in a distributed local network?"
I said "I don't know" at least 50 times and then the interview was over.
A couple of days later I got a one-line email from them that said:
"We cannot hire you because you do not know much about the Internet."
(I kid you not.)
There's no way I could pass that interview today or tomorrow or in 10 years, either. And I don't feel bad about it. Not a single person I saw in that office looked remotely happy.
Despite not knowing much about the Internet, I went on to become a well-employed web developer (and people seem to think I'm competent at it).
Long story short, don't sweat it. You will fail some technical interviews and pass others, and that's okay.
This is right.
I once was invited for an interview in a local company, that seemed to be considered among the biggest in my city. I was quiet happy about it and well prepared too!
After being done with the HR with small questions about my previous job and education and blah blah blah! I finally got to my technical interview.
The guy who was interviewing me, was a senior software engineer at that company and had been working there for a couple of years. He invited me to his office and handed me back my resume to write answers on the back of the page (yeah, that's exactly what happened).
It was a junior front-end developer's interview. 15 minutes through interview, he got a call on his cell. He picked up the call. That was probably from one of his friends and they were planning to hang out that night. 15 minutes, he talked and laughed and cursed on that call and I sat in front of him thinking "what a D"!
After continuing, he started questions about the frameworks that I had never worked on. I told him a couple of times that I don't know about this stuff but he just kept on going. And for the next 1 hour, I briefly said "I don't know that" even though I did know a whole bunch of those questions.
And then I asked him what's actually going on and he told me that they had already hired someone. So he was just messing around with me! I left in a state of anger and disappointment and took my resume with me!
You do get to get to experience these kind of interviews in your career where you just wanna get it done with and never look back again. They key is to never regret. Just take it positively and think of it as an experience that you ought to had in your life and move on.
I've been in web development for close to 10 years. The other day I saw a blog post by a 15 year old that perfectly explained something I never really understood before... I know nothing.
Well, Arden, there are always people smarter than we are and some are downright geniuses at what they do! I could say the same thing about you--that I'm totally intimidated by your skill level and wonder how I might be able to attain it. It sounds like you really care about the quality of your work and this is the most important thing, besides ABL--Always Be Learning!
Cheers,
Vickie
Well isn't that the nicest pick-me-up ever! Thank you for the kind words, that's so nice.
Also, I found the post I meant: alyssa.is/pushstate-jquery/. This was already years ago but it was one of the posts that made it click for me, and I was baffled it was written by someone who was like 15 at the time 😁
Super normal feeling. It will take a while to get over it but it is definitely the norm. In terms of technical interviews, yeah you might do better at some than others depending on what they look for, but there are ample opportunities.
1.5 years in any industry still means you are a novice. I would not consider anyone with that length of tenure able to understand all the ends and outs of growing a large scale business application. With that being said, most of the job interviews I conduct are a means to understand how they are willing to handle the situation where they really don't have experience. I take the interviewee to task until they are forced to tell me they don't know something. If they try and hustle like they understand, but they clearly don't, I would not consider them a good developer. I do this because there is so much stuff out there in the world of technology, no person can master all of it. If you try to pretend that you do to get a job, then you will try to pretend when it really counts.
As people already explained, this is the default reaction when in the world of programing, just keep it going. As for the interviews, there are both scenarios, the ones where you simply are not yet fit for, and the ones where the company is going non-sense about it (and we see a lot of these...).
Nevertheless, just keep calm, accept that you are not going to master it all and keep your focus. If you see a job which you really like but don't feel confident about yourself when it comes to the requirements, apply to it, give it a try, get to know what companies are looking for and study to get your dream job (it's usually achievable, just keep it cool and keep going)
First of all, your writing is fine--don't sweat it! I think it's really common for people to suffer from what is known as Imposter Syndrome, especially in technical fields where the learning curve is steep and constant. I was really impressed with what you've done in only a year and a half! So please don't be too hard on yourself; it's said that we can be our own worst enemies when it comes to being critical of our work.
If you are nervous about the interview process, find a friend and do a practice one. You can find typical interview questions all over online, so you could do a run-through and get used to it. Also, sites like muse.com are great for building confidence at work.
I think your past work will speak for itself when it comes to future jobs. Just make sure you are happy with the code you are putting out, and please, document it carefully so that developers who may encounter your code later don't have to struggle to understand what you were thinking about when you wrote it.
Best of luck to you!
It is healthy to assume you do not know enough, be that at 1.5 years, 15 years, or 150 years (working on that consciousness upload myself). Get out there: read, build, teach others; then restart the cycle.
Cheers!
These are the normal feelings man. I am also a fresh graduate and not have any market experience just do some freelancing. In previous week I present for the interview in the well known software company and get hire. Before this I thought I don't know anything regarding programming, literally before that I were confused about OOP concepts even but at the time of interview I answered to all the questions. You will come to know about yourself until you will present somewhere for the interview in well known software company.
Don't sweat too much. You are good. Search for junior to intermediate roles, and you got dat sh**!