
Ask HN: Good, experienced engineer but suck at interviews. Looking for a coach - throwaway13000
I am an experienced engineer(10+) working as software engineer.<p>I know all the CS basics and concepts. I can 80% of the puzzles&#x2F;coding questions in interviews. But I have few blindspots that I am hoping to use a coach for. As I am not a beginner, most online portals are not useful for me. I want to use my time efficiently.<p>If you guys know anybody who can coach an experienced engineer, let me know. I will probably need a time commitment of 1-2 hours per week from you. I am happy to pay for the service.<p>All you have to mostly do is curate a few questions in my weak areas and pester me to solve them.<p>Something like youneedaboss.com but for software engineering interviews.<p>Please let me know how I can contact you. If you have experience hiring people before, it is even better!<p>My contact is in the profile.
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itengelhardt
Hi,

I think Josh Doody might be the right mentor for you. He definitely offers
coaching/mentorship sessions. Check out his writing & work here:
[https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/](https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/)

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throwaway13000
Thanks very much. The website doesn't mention any technical mentoring but
since you mentioned, I will directly write a mail to him and find out.

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AnimalMuppet
Some questions for you:

What are your weak areas/blind spots?

What kind of programming do you do?

Where are you located?

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throwaway13000
>>What are your weak areas/blind spots?

I do trees, hash tables fairly well. When it comes to arrays, I usually do
well when brute force takes O(N) but optimal solution is O(logN). I do badly
when brute force is O(N __2) but optimal is O(N). Even in interview, I know I
should look for O(N) solution, I do get the general solution right but I fail
to get the specifics wrong. For example, most O(N __2) solutions include two
for loops. You tend to redo a lot of work if you run two loops. But figuring
out a subset of indices which do not need to be computed, one must come up
with a O(N) solution. This somehow, I fail, consistently.

Graphs are a hit or miss. I do dynamic programming well most of the times.

>>What kind of programming do you do?

I work on a major mail provider's middleware team. I write Java web services
code in a distributed environment. My service talks to storage system,
notification system etc. Most of the work involves designing and implementing
algos for rate limiting, for fetching and caching data from storage system
etc. Work also involves scaling to involve increased load etc.Day to day work
is all Java. Write REST API code +unit tests + integration tests and then
deploy. Worked on compiler frontends before(C/C++).

>>Where are you located? SF Bay area. But I am looking coach from anywhere in
the world! Email in Profile.

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AnimalMuppet
Maybe it's just your misfortune for being in the Bay Area, but...

Google exists. Knuth's TAOCP exists. In such a world, why do interviewers
expect you to be able (under pressure at a whiteboard) to come up with the
optimal algorithm? How much of the work that you do actually depends on
finding O(N) rather than O(N2) solutions?

I think that you are unfortunate in the companies you are interviewing with,
not necessarily in your interview skills or knowledge.

Can you fix it by studying? Maybe, with a lot of effort. It might be as easy
to find companies that interview with a different approach, and interview
there. (Note: Not easy, but _as_ easy.)

~~~
jaredsohn
>find companies that interview with a different approach,

[https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-
whiteboards](https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards)

~~~
throwaway13000
Well, The salary difference between FAANG and most companies on this list
easily 100K+/year. And that level, they can ask me to jump through multiple
hoops and I will be ready. Its a fairly rational decision on my part.

