
Why do technical interviews seem so intimidating? - hotz
I&#x27;ve been looking around for better opportunities, mostly to improve my financial situation.<p>It almost feels like I get anxiety at the thought of the technical assessment part of the interview process. Is this normal?<p>Most of my projects have gone to production and are successful, so I am capable&#x2F;competent. I just rely on intuition to solve problems, I don&#x27;t remember theories&#x2F;algorithms verbatim.
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romanhn
The sad reality is that technical interviews in the majority of cases do not
represent the day-to-day aspects of the job you're interviewing for. The heavy
emphasis on algo questions were popularized by Google as a way to filter
through a huge pipeline of candidates. Guess what - 99+% of companies do not
have a similar pipeline, yet blindly follow the Google format. Before that,
tech companies followed Microsoft's lead with their puzzle questions.

In the ideal world, your hard-earned knowledge and experience should prepare
you for the challenges in the role you're applying for, but sadly most
interviews test for some kind of coding ninjas that spend their days writing
optimized merge sort implementations before lunch and building high-performing
distributed caches in the afternoon, all day every day. Mind you, none of
those problems are particularly difficult, just let's not kid ourselves that
they represent the kind of daily challenges you're going to face even at
places like Google or Facebook (and especially not under the same constraints
as the interviews). The fact that Cracking The Coding Interview is considered
a must-read before interviewing is a bright indicator of how bad things have
gotten.

~~~
jermaustin1
To add to your point of these questions becoming the only way to interview a
candidate, I used to work at a web agency, and I found a lot of candidates who
were very good at answering all of the algorithm questions that the owner of
the company asked. Then I would follow up with a very short and easy written
test with 5 technical questions to gauge the candidates understanding of
JavaScript, ASP.Net, PHP, SQL, and HTML/CSS, nearly all of them failed to even
explain how they would start, let alone actually ANSWER the questions.

The inverse relation of Theoretical and Practical knowledge always blew my
mind.

Using the same set of interview questions that every other company does really
kills your ability to judge a candidate effectively, because they all know the
answers.

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seanwilson
> I just rely on intuition to solve problems, I don't remember
> theories/algorithms verbatim.

You need to practice this part then. It doesn't take a huge amount of time
when you generally know it already and it's guaranteed to help in most
interviews. It's easy to be confident when you've seen the exact same
questions before. There's only so much you can ask without being obscure.

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brudgers
An interesting podcast on hiring engineers that talks about interviewing,
[http://blog.ycombinator.com/hiring-engineers-with-ammon-
bart...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/hiring-engineers-with-ammon-bartram)

The reason I suggest it is because knowledge and insight into the hiring
process might make the interviews less stressful.

Good luck.

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telebone_man
Yes! For me, it's because it's easy to assume that the interviewer knows more
than me, and is therefore in some sort of position of power.

But I try to rationalise that. Throughout my career, I've worked with people
smarter than me. I'm not intimidated by them, so why should I be during an
interview?

With that in mind, I assume they know more until proven otherwise. And if they
do know more, I treat them the same I would outside of the interview.

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dredmorbius
Quality assessment of complex goods is difficult.

You are a complex good.

Neither you nor the firms assessing you, generally, know how to sell, or how
to buy, what it is you're offering.

That said, more practice at interviewing generally improves your performance,
though it may have little to do with actually improving the outcome of the
process in terms of offer-to-opportunity matching.

