Interviews can be very scary. What do I do when my code doesn’t work? What if I get stuck? Should I ask my interviewer for a hint?… Thursday afternoon,  I decided to go to the Mastering the Art of the Technical Interview: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly session. The room was extremely crowded when I walked in. Some of us even had to sit on the floor.  A panel of industry and academic representatives involved in hiring for technical positions were sitting on stage. This session started off with a mock interview with Lindsey Fowler from Amazon as the interviewee. I found the form a mock interview to be very helpful. It was definitely a self-reflecting learning experience. I laughed when I saw Lindsey did not do so well on her mock interview, only then I realized that I made the exact same mistakes  during  my last interview.

The panelists gave a lot of good advices, here are some of the things I learned:

About Technical Questions:

• Talk Loud. Use the white board.

• When given a technical question, ask for clarifications and make sure you fully understand the problem.

• If you have heard the question before, say so! Ask them to give you another one! (This is a big plus!)

• Think Aloud! Interviewers want to hear your thought process.

• Test your code: use examples to walk through your code, consider boundary cases.

About Behavior Questions:

• When you are asked to talk about a project you have done in the past, make sure you talk about your team, what you have learned, and what you would do differently next time.

• When the interviewer says “Do you have any questions for me?” This is your chance to tell your interviewer that “My code doesn’t work for this case. I should have …” (It shows that you can find your own mistakes)

• Make sure you know the company.  Instead of asking “What do you guys do?”, say “Oh your company does this and this. It sounds very interesting. Can you tell me more about it?”

• Be passionate! Show them you want to work for them!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!