

Ask HN: How do I interview better? - fizzaci

Over the past 4 months, I&#x27;ve spent dozens of hours talking to internal recruiters, developers, and product managers while interviewing to various tech companies. Apart from an offer that I regret turning down from half a year ago, I haven&#x27;t made any progress or gotten offers at the companies I want to work at.<p>##Details
First, some details about me.<p>- Programming seriously since high school 
- Graduated in 2012 from middle tier CS school.
- Working for almost 2 years.
- come across as young at 23.
- Lots of Android&#x2F;AOSP&#x2F;Java experience, moving towards: automation&#x2F;web scraping&#x2F;&quot;data science&quot;&#x2F;&quot;machine learning&quot;&#x2F;Python.<p>2. Organizer of 2 separate programming meetups in NYC.
    1. Meetup #1 is educational + adults
        - Consistent weekly meetups.
        - Going on for 11 months, since January 2013.
        - At least 500 attendees, possibly much more.
        - I helped start it up as subsection of bigger meetup.
    2. Meetup #2 is educational + kids
        - Once a month 3-hour workshops.
        - Somewhere on the order of 500 attendees for 2013.
        - We create our own curriculums.<p>3. No outside work projects.
    - I talk about the projects at my current company.
    - interesting projects I&#x27;ve seen other people work on.<p>## Feedback
I&#x27;ve done some analysis on myself. Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve deduced.<p>1. I suspect I&#x27;m too bubbly or enthusiastic. Maybe I come across as really young? I&#x27;ve been rejected from companies because I don&#x27;t have enough experience.
2. Algorithms and technical questions are a bit of a chore. I&#x27;m weak at this.
3. I interview better when I express less interest. It&#x27;s a little parodoxical for me.
4. Not going through my personal network. I am a significant part of 2 meetups, I should take advantage of that.<p>Can I get some feedback regarding this?
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jacksondeane
* I am assuming you are applying/interviewing for developer jobs.

Stop worrying about being "too bubbly or enthusiastic", coming across young &
organizing meetups.

Start worrying about not having outside work projects & being weak on
technical questions.

You need to be able to prove to a potential employer that you can do the job.
Organizing meetups is nice but does not show anything about your development
skills. A github profile with a few projects related to the type of
development you want to get into will do much more for you than anything else.

~~~
fizzaci
Thanks for replying, Jackson.

Well, I do have a share of nontrivial projects on github, I just don't think
they'll attract companies. I've done a fair share of web scraping as projects
(like scraping GSMarena for phones, or the Apple store for information +
reviews). It's not exactly the sort of stuff to display though, in the way
that someone who does iOS/Android/web dev can display.

I did want to create a web frontend to the GSMArena data, maybe I should
extend that with something on the frontend.

