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Hi. I also feel this way when I'm interviewing, so please know that you're not alone. Interview Anxiety afflicts a lot of us and it makes us perform much worse in interviews. The way that interviews are structured tend to hurt people as well, often deliberately trying to create a sense of inferiority in applicants to help close deals and negotiate rates. It's an act, usually an intentional one! One of the most effective ways I've found to deal with this is be open. Say, "Yeah, I suffer a bit from anxiety and interviews in particular are difficult. Do you have a take home interview? I can easily commit to git in near real time if you want a blockchain-quality log of my process, and I'm happy to review it with an engineer." I have gotten a surprising number of takes on this (and in general I annihilate these). As a bolster to your confidence, try not to take these too seriously as an indicator of your personal skill. Having worked a bit on my current and past employer's interview process, tbh an awful lot of orgs have questions that are more like riddles than actual coding exercises; they often have a simple solution you have to "know" otherwise the problem is excruciating and every solution is obviously bad. Examples of this include "chocolate bar" division problems, skyline problems, or rainfall problems. All of them are bad examples. We also enjoy a sellers market for many tech skills right now. In such a market, interviews can also be information for you to save your time not proceeding. This feels very strange for people normalized to the creepy feudal culture of tech where you align yourself with a company body and soul and only state laws allows you to escape their clutches, but it's pretty powerful. If an interview seems deliberately excruciating, just say, "I've seen all I need to see. Thanks for your time, but I don't think you're a good fit for what I'm looking for in an employer." Finally, it's also worth remembering that just modest reading in PL, CS and database literature written in the last 10 years often gives you ammunition to completely break down these questions. The folks that structure and ask these only seldom actually their theoretical basis. I've managed to break out of ugly and tedious interview questions by flipping the conversation to something I do know well and am confident speaking to, like modern O(n) sorts (discrimination, american flag), wavelet trees, recursion schemes, CRDTs and strategies for gossip protocols. Appeal to their greed and interest and show them that you DO know things, you just may not know THIS thing RIGHT NOW. |