7 Common Mistakes in the Coding Interview (for Software Engineers)

hey tech late here welcome back to another episode of tech lead today I'll be your tech lead at the tech lead and this is coffee time with the tech lead now I thought what we will talk about today are seven common mistakes that you might make in the technical interview now I might be qualified to talk about this because I am an ex-googler engineer tech lead and I've done over 100 technical interviews and I've seen them on today's video by the way is brought to you by brilliant org an educational website where you can learn about algorithms computer science fundamentals math probability statistics and the whole range of topics that can help you increase your technical fundamentals and knowledge to make sure that you pass your next technical interview with flying colors so that you can see that light of success now there are a lot of common mistakes that newcomers and veterans alike will make when they walk into a technical interview and having done so many interviews in my past I will be able to clearly see a lot of mistakes these are common mistakes that you can easily correct and they're going to be applicable not just for technical interviews but also for any interview and any interaction in general and I think that these are going to be great philosophies upon which you may live your life and base your life on now the technical interview generally consists of five to six short 45-minute sessions and these are sessions in which you have to prove yourself you only have one chance per session to show why you're the person who's qualified and if any one of these people give you a low mark a low score then your chances are going to be really up against you because a lot of these companies believe in the idea of not hiring false positives they were biased towards not giving you the benefit of the doubt if they don't know if the signals not clear then it's just going to be a pass because there's going to be enough people who can give a strong higher signal and if they accidentally make a bad hire is really costly for the company to try to fix those mistakes and so that's why a lot of companies will just err on the side of not hiring people if they're not really sure so one funny thing is of this panel of interviewers it's not like anyone really has the ability to just say well yeah we should hire you we want to be nice to you and just give you that high higher mark because overall you will need everybody or most people to give you that positive higher score if only one person gives you the a higher score that's just not going to be enough however it will be enough if one person gives a negative score sometimes you just sync your whole interview process like if one person just said that you're a jerk that could be enough to just think you although not necessarily you may have noticed by the way that were several minutes into the video by now so let's just get into it let's get into it tip number one what's tip number one well let's talk about tip number one and what I'm going to tell you now is my top number one tip on what mistake people make when interviewing for the technical interview so stay tuned because that's coming up right now that tip is that tip is and it's really the only reason that I thought of making this video really for you that tip is to get a referral don't just think that you can do it on your own and this is one mistake that I made when I first began applying for jobs straight out of college I was thinking hey I'm pretty hot stuff I don't need help I'm gonna do it on my own I don't need my aunts help I don't need my uncle's help or some distant relatives help you I'm just gonna do this on my own I can get A's on tests on my own I just need to work a little bit harder and I'm going to have a little bit of self respect for myself and like most self-respecting Atos I'm just going to do this on my own and that's really not the way that this works and I remember when I was starting out and I had no experience and nobody could vouch for me it was very very difficult for me to get my first technical job and I didn't want to ask anybody for help I didn't really know my relatives that well my aunt was a director at the tech company I didn't want to bother her but she heard I was looking for a job put in a good word for me and I managed to get one summer internship out of that at the tech company that was juniper Networks and you may be thinking well yeah fine you got one small little stupid internship at the tech company you know who cares right that's not that big of a deal but what happened was I kept building on that and that one little piece angled my trajectory upwards such that my next job after that what they saw that I had this tech internship and I could just get an internship at like Microsoft after that if I tried to apply for say getting Microsoft intership straight away maybe I wouldn't have been able to do it if I didn't have that tech internship maybe I wouldn't have had any of what I currently have you know maybe I would just be like a school system administrator or something like you know they say that beginnings are very fragile very delicate and they say that some of the biggest decisions in your life are the smallest choices so just angling your career trajectory a little bit upwards give me that small little boost can over time lead you into that light of success instead of going down just a very plain mediocre Road and now looking back I think that referrals are very important I got a referral I know a lot of other people who got referrals and you know these people don't necessarily need to know you super well and you don't necessarily need to be applying for like a really good role but just having a little bit of help having the humility to accept that help I think will go a long way and there's nothing to be ashamed about I would encourage you to ask around find out who in your circle or even outer circle may be working at some company that you're interested in and just try to get a referral from that person you know even like a summer internship or something like that it's going to help you a lot the second tip I have for you is to just make sure that you're applying I know a lot of people just get discouraged they don't apply anymore after they get the first rejection or two and it really hits them they get into a sense of failure they don't want to fail anymore they don't want to feel rejected anymore they feel they don't want to waste other people's time but I was surprised to see that some people out there are applying to like a hundred different jobs and you know I think this is really the right attitude to have you know even for me I might apply to like ten jobs and if I couldn't get any of those ten I would just be like yeah forget it I'm just gonna play video games all summer or something like that and you have to remember for me I've failed that the Google interview process like three times before I finally got in and it's not necessarily always going to be your fault a lot of times it's an issue of timing not having enough budget to hire for a certain role it could be that that you're they're just too many other highly qualified applicants you know there may be a whole variety of reasons so I would encourage you to just not get too discouraged don't take it personally and you know just make sure that you study up learn some interview tips and tricks' brush up your resume and just keep applying and see what you can get I strongly believe in celebrating a culture of failure and unfortunately that's not the way a lot of people are these days they would just say oh you apply then you failed you know they'll make fun of you for that don't let them get to you this is the way the game is played I also know here that a lot of the people will read what's in the news like they'll say oh Google is you know anti conservative and they're going to just take this one point that they read in the news and use that and say yeah I don't want to apply to some company because I read this thing in the news and now it's a big deal you know in reality I don't think these are very big deals within the companies like you know a lot of these companies are working on a million different things and then one small piece gets leaked into the news and then the news media makes a huge deal out of it and that everyone thinks that this is such a big deal but in reality I would say 99% of the time engineers are just talking about the tech if you're not interested in messing around with politics you don't have to don't let that just consume you or dissuade you you know I would recommend first get the offer and then you can think about you know I think that a lot of times people would just look for reasons look for excuses for how they can not challenge themselves and you don't want to be that person you know like a lot of these things they're not as big as you may be imagining third common mistake for you is focusing too much on the tech especially for technical interviews you may be thinking that all people care about is how technical you are how fast can you solve how efficient are you what's your time space analysis can you write the code but I don't think it's really about that you know in the end people are human the whole process is human and so remember to show your friendly side show a little bit humor I think humor is always great to have like some business casual humor if you can go through the interview process with the attitude of friendly professionalism where it looks like you're a pretty chill person who people might want to hang out with go to offsides with maybe just get to know a little bit better a kind of an interesting person kind of fun then I think that would be great to show but if you and you're just super serious and nervous and anxious and stressed out and you ace the entire technical portion but you just don't seem very friendly you don't you seem kind of distant kind of aloof then I think that sometimes subconsciously interviewers who are human as well maybe a little bit picky err you know they may just say yeah I didn't really like your analysis when in reality maybe they just felt that your charisma wasn't quite there if you seem like a really friendly person the interviewer will be rooting for you trying to find ways to help you out find ways to just make sure that you succeed maybe just working with you better and that teamwork skill right it's going to be great to have great just show tip number four is not preparing I know a lot of people don't want to prepare for technical interviews because they think it's just garbage is ridiculous and you're right but that's currently the way the game is played I would recommend that you prepare two technical things to talk about things that are of sufficient technical death and then two personal stories about yourself about teamwork about your behavior personality leadership communication skills working with conflict things like that and throughout the interview which is going to be several hours long you can just have at least four stories that you can refer back to and trust me as you're talking you're going to find plenty of opportunities to just bring up stories like this and just bring the conversation to these stories which are supposed to be very well crafted and you'll be able to get to them you know don't just think that you'll be able to instantly think up any story to a question that I might ask you like you don't want to be the person who two hours after the interview you remember oh I should have talked about this story that that would have been such a great story I should have toad have it prepared beforehand there's nothing more boring to me than interviewing a college new grad and when I asked like tell me about some project that you did they say they've done no projects but only have college coursework to talk about so that I said okay fine tell me about your compilers project course and they talked about it and it's pretty boring it's not very impressive so I would say that if you're in college or you don't have much more to show beyond just your basic coursework or if you feel that your current selection of projects is not very interesting then start thinking about maybe coming up with some independent project that you can work on you know it doesn't really have to be very complex I would say even just building a simple client with a back-end and communication between the client and back-end through some API service is going to be already very good to talk about you know sometimes that's all I'm really looking for and very few people seem to even have experience like this and what I want to talk about is like how did you define the API what was the communication mechanism did you use JSON XML how did the client get the data back how did they use that data what language was the server written in what technical challenges there were if you can come up with stores like this that's going to be really great to talk about within the first 10 minutes of the interview say before the technical whiteboarding begins tip number five for you is spending all of your time on one problem if I ask one problem I sometimes see that people will spend the whole time working on that one problem and assume that that was the only question that has for you whereas in reality I had the follow-up question to that and then I had the second question I wanted to actually get to and that would have been the main question so try to plow through these questions quicker if you can so remember that even if you get the problem entirely correct if you were just really slow and it took you 30 minutes just to get through that first portion of the question that's not going to be enough make sure that you're working fast and you're keeping an eye on time but that time is very important and you want to pack in as much content into that time as you can to demonstrate how much you can get through that productivity efficiency factor is something to really consider the sixth tip I have for you is for technical interviews to remember to write the code don't just think that all you have to do is hand wave because people actually want to see you be able to code see the code is good too it's fine but sometimes mix in some real code with semicolons and variables and all that stuff just so that you can satisfy those hard core engineers some of them just want to make sure that you can actually code and remember that has come in these days for people to take a picture of the code that you wrote at the end that is used as a record and what I've know this is a lot of the people can hand wave talk about what a solution might look like but until you can actually put the code down the credit that you get for that is not going to be as significant as it should be to be extra clear just make sure that you put the coat down onto the wall along with this I want to remind you to make sure that your resume is also very clear about the projects that you've done when I write feedback for a candidate I will often use the resume as a reference to remember what we talked about and if I'm reading your resume and it's usually a bunch of technical mumbo-jumbo and I can't figure out what you actually did and I don't remember and if your resume just said utilize enterprise-class Java Ajax Hyperion technical note interfaces to integrate quantum-mechanical artificial intelligence well that sounds really great but I really have no idea whether it was and I'm not going to put that into the feedback because I don't even know what it was about the seventh tip I have for you is not focusing on analysis enough a lot of people are really eager to code really eager to just start writing stuff they don't teach you analysis as much as they should in college but the first thing to do is really to analyze and talk through what your solution may look like talk about that time space analysis otherwise what are you even writing right what are we even coding here is this even going to work you know and then sometimes I see people just start writing their recursion right in there for loops and just like what is this what is this even supposed to be didn't we think about this or are we just starting to code here not all companies but some companies will actually first write a design dog evaluating the alternatives before they actually start writing code if you just start writing code you're kind of doing things backwards in some scenarios I have one more bonus tip for you which is to enjoy your lunch you know this is your one chance to go pick out at the cafeteria so I recommend just eating as much as you like you know it's a buffet save your appetite for it and when you're done eating ask for dessert you know don't be shy about it just be like yeah I want two desserts I'm just gonna go eat like all of this stuff and then when the interviewer asks you on your way out like if you want drink yeah go grab a drink sample some of the snacks sample some of the food grab a drink try things out a lot of people seem to just get boring water and I just think it's kind of wasted like I think it's great I would do with FRU my last and final tip and the best tip of all is a lot of people don't prepare them fundamentally they don't learn they don't have that technical knowledge and you can get that for yourself by checking out brilliant org this is a great website for learning computer science fundamentals algorithms mathematics probability statistics and a lot of fun because you can go through various problem sets there are problems and solutions with thorough explanations and there are a wide variety of topics so you can focus on whichever area that you feel you need more help on I might also recommend for you to check out their statistics or probability section anytime a candidate that comes to me and starts busting out their statistics and probability skills I'm usually pretty impressed even if they're computer science core fundamentals are not that strong I might still say well hey they seem to have really good analytical skills for probability and statistics you know every company is very metric space these days they use a lot of this stuff and so if you expand your knowledge out into other areas and then mention that in the interviews I think that can also reflect positively for you so that'll for me let me know if you have any tips for common mistakes people make in interviews if you liked the video give it a like and subscribe and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: TechLead

Views: 463,075

Rating: 4.7550149 out of 5

Keywords: algorithms, computer science, interview, coding, techlead, programming, job, google, facebook, microsoft, amazon, resume, technical, tricks, apple, hiring, software, career, netflix, tips, engineer

Id: pV7XIZnsbgM

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018