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by nrjdhsbsid 3467 days ago
The interview process for engineers is absolutely brutal.

I almost lost hope on my last job jump when it took me three months and six on-site interviews before I got an offer.

What will help you the most in the search is probably not what you think. I thought have a GitHub and some cool projects and a nice blog would make landing a job easy for me... Annnddd 95% of the companies I talked to didn't care.

What helped enormously was studying the same questions that interviewers are likely to pull from. Once I studied hard on interview Q&A I went from no offers to getting three in the same week.

The interview process is usually borderline hazing and the questions being asked have little or no bearing on the actual job. The job requirements listed are actually just some staff engineers wish list of what he would use if he could rewrite the garbage fire that is the application you'll be working on.

It doesn't help that half the time the manager interviewing you hasn't written a line of code for ten years... or ever in the case that you're interviewing with HR.

My theory is that male dominated fields tend to be steeped in competition, or at least the goal is to appear that way. You don't want your hiring to be "weak" and new guys definitely need to "climb the ladder". This makes interviewing for these positions a complete nightmare.

Just keep up applying and remember the interviews are tough on purpose. HR doesn't look good unless they can bring in an endless stream of top tier applicants. Management doesn't look good if they hire "anyone that walks through the door". The result: companies throw away many, maybe most of their good applicants.

1 comments

> What helped enormously was studying the same questions that interviewers are likely to pull from. Once I studied hard on interview Q&A I went from no offers to getting three in the same week.

Interesting to hear on what are the sources 'that interviewers are likely to pull from'? And probably some guidelines as well, because interviewers like to be stingy and want to hear _the right_ answers.

Study google search results for "interview questions language X" with X being anything mentioned on the application. If js is listed expect things like the difference between == or === and whether variable declarations are hoisted for example.

Other questions I got were things like "can a static class be extended in language X" and other questions that test your trivia abilities but don't really matter when writing code 99% of the time. Like for js, everyone knows not to use == but most people don't know exactly why.

What I did was read several books on the language semantics for my top 2 languages cover to cover multiple times. The process was painful but I was prepared for nearly anything.

Answer quickly even if you might be wrong. Concise answers are perceived as more correct from what I've experienced.