Comment by drekipus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drekipus | Hacker News Reader

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I don't get why everyone seems so hung up on the interview.

Relax, talk about yourself, talk about what you've done.

I think doing things like this and from the thousands of Reddit posts about "the dreaded interview problem" only leads people to over think it and have worse anxiety and performance, not better.

The interview to my first job was just listening to my then-boss talk about the company for 30 minutes, the second was stonewalling while my boss grilled me to make sure I know what I said I know.

You're not going to be able to "train" for that just like you can't "train" for getting rejected for dating, you just have to learn social interactions and go do it a couple of times.

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I did just remember my worst interview experience, where, after being jobless for a number of years (early on, mind. I'm still young) I applied for phone IT support. - the interviewers asked me to:

"describe the best vacation you had"

"I haven't really been on a vacation" (I haven't been working, poor family, etc)

"Ok describe the vacation you would like to have"

"... I literally don't want a vacation.. I am looking to find work." (Jobless.for.years. every day has been a mediocre vacation up until this point.)

"..... Ok just tell us a story about a vacation"

"....... Ok I suppose I'll go to Rome then? And uh... " Draws blanks

You can't be prepared for interviews where the interviewers are shit, nor if they blindside you with questions like that.

You also might lose your ability to detect bullshit if you try.

If the company you're interviewing for is just some boss rambling about his wife, then sure, don't bother training for it or doing everything you can to increase your chances of success.

If the company you're interviewing for is among the highest paying companies in the world, where you can literally change the quality of your life and your family's life by making enough money to comfortably retire as a multimillionaire by the time you're 35-40... then investing months doing the dreaded leetcode grind, mock interviews, and doing everything in your power to prepare for it is absolutely worth it.

In fact, seeing just how few people are willing to actually invest time and effort into excelling at an interview process that can tangibly improve ones life in ways very few other professional careers can is even more of a reason to do it. Every time I see people who are dismissive of technical questions, rant about how it's unfair that interviewers expect them to understand fundamental data structures, algorithms, time complexity, and think that all they should need to know to be a developer is how to glue a few APIs together, it makes me both sad to see how low of a standard we hold ourselves to, but also in a selfish way it makes me happy knowing that the competition for competent developers is so low.

No offense, but the difficult in a job interview for IT Support and a SWE position at a FAANG+ company could not be wider.

I had a career in recruiting before moving into eng and I loved interviewing. I'd bullshit with the interviewer, we'd talk about shared interests, and we'd talk about recruiting techniques for a little while. I passed the vast majority of interviews with absolutely minimal prep.

I'm a year into an eng career and I've already failed more technical interviews than I failed in my entire recruiting career.

Apples to oranges.

> I don't get why everyone seems so hung up on the interview.

Because if you need a job, the wild asymmetry between you and the interviewers.

You have to be ON for that short time and ready to deal with questions like what you got about "best vacation" or in the next question code a red-green tree implementation, followed seconds later by describing a full scale cloud architecture.

All of that in an hour.

And if you falter anywhere along the line, they reject you and you worry about how you will feed and clothe yourself and your family.

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