Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

I found myself interviewing with a hedge fund last year because they liked some of my open source stuff (and approach to API design)...

I had about six conversations with a bunch of the team and a conversation with the CEO to sell me on the position. The last step was a seventh “conversation” with the Chief Data Officer to figure out if this was something I really wanted.

The CDO had different ideas… he joined the Zoom, started sharing his screen (with no introductions), opened a Google Doc and told me we were going “write some code together”.

I was pretty confused and flustered but tried to roll with it. He first asked me to “reverse a string”. OK. My lil Python snippet was fine but he didn’t like that it wasn’t “the most memory efficient way to do it”. He then asked me to write a function to approximate “e”. I just ended the interview right there.

That’s not bombing the interview in my book, that’s just being thrown in front of a bus. Seems like they have terrible hiring practices.

I have so many stories that I bombed the interviews, but this is probably the most interesting one.

In 2008 I was searching for my first full time job. At the time a social network company flew me out to SF from Toronto for interview. I was promised a 5-hour block but only lasted 3 hours before they walked me out. I don't remember the questions, but I do remember that the VP of Engineering at the time was browsing his BlackBerry and weren't listening to me. Needless to say, I felt humiliated for awhile after that experience.

Fast forward to 2018, I interviewed at this startup in SF and I did well in the first 2 sessions. The 3rd session was the CTO and he was the same person that ignored me 10 years prior. This time I did well enough that he immediately got the CEO to meet with me and offer me the job on the spot. I thanked them and ended up not taking that job due to a better opportunity elsewhere.

The CTO didn't remember me nor I confronted him about it, but it's a small win in my book.

I had a phone interview with Apple, and I kept hearing a soft but regular noise in the background on the interviewer's side, very much like a clock ticking, as if they were timing me. I was already very nervous, and the noise was very distracting. I felt like I was in The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. Needless to say, I did not perform well under those conditions.

I interviewed at Stripe, pre-COVID, and it was an onsite interview after I suffered a concussion. I should have cancelled the interview, but I was excited about the opportunity, and had underestimated how disabled the concussion left me.

Objectively I think I interviewed fairly strongly, however for the hands on coding portion of the interview, I basically couldn't even write more than a few lines. I couldn't remember simple things like function or class definitions. I had to look up a few syntax things, and my already challenging dyslexia was exacerbated to the point where I could barely type.

I recognize looking back on it that I had a freaking concussion and wasn't even supposed to be looking at screens or reading, but it was still really embarrassing.

Worst interviews are ambushes. Things are going fine, you're discussing tech stuff, guy decides you need to "code" right now in an alien coding environment.

First time, guy asks me how I'd do some problem, I talk him through it, I mention there's an easy O(n^2) way but with a bit of thinking there's probably an nlogn way. He doesn't want to let me think for half a minute, just rushes me into the inefficient solution. So I do that, and at the end it's "oh I think there's a better way".

Second time I've been through a bunch of rounds, 3rd party recruiter calls me to ask to go into the office to meet the boss, to discuss terms and numbers. I get there, he wants to code some BS algorithm on a piece of paper. I do the whole thing, he finds a bug. Won't tell me what it is. As far as I can tell, he isn't a compiler. So I search around a bit, find the bug, whatever, I don't get why he can't just let it go when we've talked through the algo. So we go on, second problem, I nail it again. Again there's some bug. I tell him listen, if this wasn't on a damn piece of paper in crappy handwriting, it wouldn't be a problem. Why are you trying to hire a head of trading technology using a piece of paper and a pen?

Didn't get the job, funnily enough.

If you've bombed an interview in a skillset that you've done productive work in, the fault is with the design of the interview. This doesn't mean that you won't be expected to skill up in the different set to pass those interviews, but don't take it personally either way.

As an example, almost no bit of coding work is done in an environment with no reference material, no autocompletion, no compiler feedback, and no debugger, yet many companies expect people to do whiteboard interviews with syntax and language features from memory.

That's exactly why so many of us get so frustrated with the state of technical interviews / technical hiring / HR at tech firms in general. The interviews seem designed as some kind of frat-like hazing gauntlet rather than a legitimate discussion / demonstration of how this professional could contribute to and benefit the organization.

10+ years ago I've been applying for junior ruby dev roles while still at university.

At one company they gave me a pen and a piece of paper, told me to sort an array and gave me a couple of minutes to write my answer.

I assumed I'm at command line, so I generated a rails scaffold (model, controller, view, db migrations), created and migrated the database, opened a database prompt and wrote a SQL "select ... order by" statement.

I think I wanted to demonstrate that I know rails and related tools; but I was also stressed and didn't communicate well. After looking at my answer they quickly ended the interview, told me "we'll be in touch" and I got a rejection email on my way home.

one amusing experience was a phone screen for, I think, dropbox. The problem was related to Conway's game of life and file I/O and I solved it pretty quickly. Then I had an awkward back and forth where my interviewer asked me if there was a way to process the file line-by-line without reading the whole thing into memory. I pointed out that my solution did so already. We went back and forth over whether this was true or not a couple times, then we moved on and ended the interview ... I did not pass, presumably based on this misunderstanding.

My son was only a few months old. I had made it to the final rounds the interview process at a FAANG. He hd kept me up the night before as he had a cold I tended to take care of him in the night so my partner could sleep.

Next day I was asked all kinds of fun, esoteric questions about the C specification. That’s was hard. I was frazzled.

The final question I was asked to implement knn. Which I did brute force. And then I was asked to optimize it. And I was basically falling apart at that point and couldn’t recall a k-d tree. I blundered my way through some dead end.

This was for an engineering position embedded in an ops team. Sensing my interviewer’s frustration I asked if they’d ever have to implement knn on a page in a limited amount of time in order to bring the system back online. They said no. I never got an offer for that one.

All of the people who admit their process is flawed A) don't change the process and B) don't hire people who point it out

CEO: "please sit down"

Me: *sits down*

CEO (whispers to my ear): "this is my chair"

"How would you deal with a problem employee?" Without missing a beat, I asked, "Does he have a weapon?"

oooofff... I had to fire someone once with a serious anger management problem. This was legitimately one of the scenarios we considered in how to best let them go and not have anyone get hurt.

Google relies on writing syntactically correct code in a google doc with no autocomplete/auto indenting during their interviews. The cognitive load of this plus having to answer very difficult obscure algorithmic questions was too foreign from my normal workflow and too heavy of a cognitive load for me to be able to answer the question accurately in the time given. I hope they don't build production code this way.

Now I'm just imagining an april fools event where they replace the really nice internally hosted code editor with google docs, disable code search, and call it interview awareness day.

1. I froze during a whiteboard interview where I was asked to pretty print a tree in front of two people. Performance anxiety made me implode and stumble so much that I failed to implement basic recursion :')

2. I froze again during a live coding interview when I was asked to correct code under test for a coin change problem. I couldn't get over the fact that someone was judging me based on what they were seeing live and I messed it up so badly that I told them I'm not good at live coding and left it at that >_<

FFS after ~15 years in the field having worked on firmware all the way up the stack one would think I'd be great at throwing out solutions to trivial problems off the top of my head...nope not my brain :D

I've found for myself that there's a massive difference in how someone approaches live coding. If it's a colleague or even my entire team I know that we are doing this together because we have a common goal and will support each other...unlike in an interview where it's set up to be antagonistic and that throws me off completely.

Definitely bombed my very first interview.

After sending almost 150 CVs I had the opportunity to schedule a call with a manager at Apple for an internship, this was supposed to be the classic "get to know each other for a couple of minutes and then talk about how this is going to work".

Everything was fine until the manager asked a very basic problem (checking if a sudoku solution was valid), I did not expect a coding question during this very meeting so I was very nervous at the time and messed up.

They told me that they had found another candidate for the position saying that do "first come first served". I don't believe a single word of it, they took another candidate just because I was not good enough during the coding part and that's okay!

Moral of the story: don't believe what they say about the interview that it's going to take place, don't make assumptions, just be prepared for everything that could happen.

I interviewed for an ML scientist role (remote) while I was feeling a bit under the weather. I got through to a round with the founder/CEO and things were going well. However, this was a few days later and I was beginning to feel not so good, lots of brain fog and fatigue. The interviewer asked me a fairly basic question about a certain module and why one would use it and what the effect would be with given parameters. I sort of dropped the ball and said something reasonable but not super rigorous, and I could tell the interviewer wasn’t very satisfied.

The next day I took a COVID test and it was positive. I should’ve postponed the interview as soon as something was off but it would be weeks until I felt better. I ended up getting a better offer at a better company but it still hurt to be rejected at least in part because I wasn’t feeling 100%. Live and learn.

I was given two hours to answer two questions and to program two algorithms. I answered the two questions right. Finished the first code challenge but my tests only passed 75% (forgot some edge cases?) and the second problem I was two mentally exhausted to give a crap, so i described the solution in natural language and called it a day. I was not thrilled about the position (i had something better lined up), just took the code to see how hard it would be. It was not so hard, if given more time.

Update: first problem I solved with a breadth first search, the second was a minimum spamming tree.

I had an interview with a startup, completely owned the questions on the technical interview. When time came for the 1 - 1 interview with the CTO I had luck to ask them about their growth rate and investors. No regrets.

I can think of a few.

Uni interview at Cambridge for physics, I was asked to: derive the equation of motion for some coins sliding into each other on a table, and identify the oscillatory nodes of a tea cup struck with a spoon. Needless to say I didn’t get in and have the utmost respect for those who did!

First technical job interview I was asked whether a heavy or light element is better for absorbing nuclear radiation. Now that one I am embarrassed I didn’t get having completed my physics degree. Lighter is better.

Was that for an undergraduate at Cambridge?

I bombed my biggest interview (Google).

I was given very short notice and had a ton of family stuff going on, so I could barely prepare.

I agreed to another interview a few months after, but they ghosted me. No hard feelings, but I haven't felt like interviewing for a FAANG ever since.

I'm unable to feel shame or embarassment in interviews anymore. Have encountered sufficient share of assholes, had enough time and hopes smashed and thrown away. If your point is to find incompetent fraud, let me be your incompetent fraud.

I have pretty severe C-PTSD and structural dissociation and this has resulted in some moments... Usually this is just a tendency to have memory issues under stress. I have blanked on everything from the names of my own projects to names of companies I have worked for.

When I get triggered in an interview very "interesting" things can happen. Probably the most "legendary" is when I started uncontrollably crying and sobbing in an interview. They obviously wanted to bail and reschedule but I composed myself and was like "no keep going. I am fine". The irony was that they completely lost focus and did a terrible interviewing job but I did pretty good. Shockingly, I did not get that job.

Wrote an O(n²) solution not thinking n would be 1000000000.

manager at netflix told me that i used an older java version in my take home which indicated that i am not someone who keeps up with latest tech.

This is not an example of bombing an interview, if they wanted a recent java version they should have stated that.

Unless you chose a java version old enough to have a driving license, in which case I could understand that response.

it was java 7 when the latest release was java 8.

I, a React developer, took three months off developing in React, only to forget how `useEffect()` works when you pass it no dependencies (vs when you pass it an empty array.)

Idea: Build a map of things that are easily forgotten and treat it as a map of places where the API needs improvement. (Following ye olde Law of Least Surprise. Thanks, Larry Wall!)

I, a React developer for ~8 years, don’t really remember what useEffect does without the second param. I never needed it, so I forgot. I almost feel it should be a required prop, and I doubt that that knowledge alone would fail or pass an interview.

One of the things about React is that local codebase conventions really influence what parts of the API are high-touch for you.

I too have been coding in React for that long (precisely that long, oddly enough ;D) and I used `useEffect()` in pretty much everything I was doing.

There are reasons for this that are local to the project I was on for most of that time.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure my embarrassing confusion cost me the interview in question.

Coding is a lot like playing a musical instrument, or singing. Without daily practice, you get musty. You can scrape off the must in a matter of days or weeks, but in the meantime, you can be expected to bomb any audition.

This is why it's so good to have something on the go on GitHub. It's not about the star-count, it's about keeping your hand in.

The fact that it’s unintuitive and different is why hooks are a joke. Class components just make sense.

I never had a problem with the explicit lifecycle methods in class components, and the concept of a functional component effectively being the render method in isolation. To me there’s only one clear advantage to hooks and that’s sheer reduction in raw lines of code. Having said that, it’s a pretty huge advantage for something like redux.

TBH I disagree, I prefer strict functional programming, mostly for composability. Class components feel like translating everything into latin numerals and then back out again.

Hooks help me avoid that pain. But is the API perfect? Nope.

There are also frameworks like solidjs which have similar syntax to React but avoid the complexity of hooks with a simpler API and no hook rules. Classes are not the only solution