[plasticbugs]

I think this is really down to the few companies that have "taken a chance" on a bootcamp grad in the past and are able to see past the lack of experience after one or more good experiences - which feels like something large companies can do more (and more often) than smaller ones.

It's also a product of my inability to really and truly master interview coding challenges and the pressure of whiteboarding. It's absolutely nerve-wracking and I've choked every single time regardless of how well-prepped I was. At a Google on-site, I was asked to traverse a binary search tree on a whiteboard and then, after doing it successfully, I was challenged to do it without recursion and I was unable to reason about how to do it and I choked completely and utterly. The rest of the interview went pretty well, so I would guess that my whiteboarding fail was the main thing that prevented me from getting hired there.

O'Reilly's interview process did not involve whiteboarding or things like trick questions, toy problems or algorithm stuff. It was a straightforward coding challenge and then a fairly low-pressure conversation about my code, the decisions I made and how I might modify what I implemented if I had more time, or was confronted with a specific challenge.

I think if I now were to enter the job market with the experience I have, I hope that I wouldn't be immediately confronted with things in an interview like traversing binary search trees, or implementing a Fisher Yates shuffle on a whiteboard.

[jnguyen64]

I think I've been pretty lucky with the jobs that I've had so far in my career where none of them have required extensive whiteboarding for their interview processes. I completely empathize with you though, as I feel like every time I've encountered whiteboarding in an interview, I must've seemed so incompetent to the interviewer.

It's definitely possible to find jobs that don't require whiteboarding for their interview process - best of luck when you look again!