| Rejected by 10 different roles when you only have 1 year of experience is normal, as is being rejected by 20 companies during college. I've done (far) worse, and I'm still in this industry after 10 years and enjoying it. If you spend 1-3 hours per day on interview prep you are overdoing it. Stop it, spend your time doing something else that will benefit you in more subtle ways in the interview and in everyday life, like:
* Get in better physical shape (take a walk! go dancing! lift weights! bike around town!)
* Hang out with friends, or try to get a new friend by putting yourself into a different environment than you usually are in.
The point is to clear some of the anxiety and stress that you now seem to carry, and go into an interview with more confidence and more relaxed. I too suck at algorithm problems. It is mostly because I fail to see the relevance to the work I want to do, which is to build great software with other devs that want to do the same. The 2-3 times during my career when I've really been confronted with problems that require some clever algorithms to do this, then all of a sudden it becomes very interesting and keeps me up at night. So perhaps algorithm problems at the whiteboard during the interview is not your strength. It is surely not what the job you are interviewing for is really about either.
Just be honest during the interview that you find these situations awkward, and that you perform much better in a real work environment. Explain what value you think you can deliver to the employer. It might be that you get things done with quality without over-engineering for the future, that you have a solid linux sysadmin background and can
help out in a web dev team with these skills, and that you have experience of what works once things are deployed. Or maybe that you really enjoy working close to customers, or that you are the go-to-guy when it comes to tool XYZ, etc. First and forement do a good job were you are now. If your goal is to get into a top-tier company then accept that you may have to change employer 5-10 times before you get there. You must always focus on
doing a good job at your current employer, since the more years in the industry you have, the less algos at the whiteboard during interview counts, while contacts and your reputation starts to weigh very
heavy. Best of luck! (As always when answering these kinds of questions you really are shooting from the hip because you have so little information, compared to seeing/knowing someone in real life...) |