
Ask HN: Purchase live-coding/interview instruction? - CoreSet
I&#x27;m terrible at the live-coding &#x2F; whiteboarding part of interviews and was wondering...<p>Are there any companies that allow you to purchase a &quot;mock&quot; interview session? My ideal would be a situation where someone with hiring experience conducted several interviews with me, giving me feedback each time.<p>Thanks!
======
avitzurel
Hi,

I have been running mock interviews on Twitch for the last couple of months
now, and the responses are incredible.

You can check out previous interviews on the YouTube[1] channel.

You can also hop by the Twitch[2] channel. I usually stream three times a week
at 8 pm PST.

The interviews are 100% free and offered as a community resource. You can
maintain anonymity as well. Feel free to jump on the discord [3] if you want
to schedule one

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuFT6CtDnOGvcn9WdAvBusA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuFT6CtDnOGvcn9WdAvBusA)

[2] [https://twitch.tv/KensoDev](https://twitch.tv/KensoDev)

[3] [http://avi.io/discord](http://avi.io/discord)

~~~
wingerlang
I'd love to see them categorised better, I was looking for something specific
e.g. an iOS developer interview which I didn't find. Not really sure if it is
mentioned in the description or if each one is one or multiple interviews but
it was kind of messy so I lost interest fairly fast.

------
Spoom
Gainlo ([http://www.gainlo.co/](http://www.gainlo.co/)) does mock interviews
with actual Big N / unicorn developers for a price.

Triplebyte
([https://triplebyte.com/iv/afyYdFu/cp](https://triplebyte.com/iv/afyYdFu/cp)
, referral link), if you can make it to their final video interview, will also
give you full feedback whether or not you pass, for free. They don't do
whiteboarding but they do live coding and debugging.

There are a few general tips though... the biggest of which is to talk out
loud. They're not necessarily wanting a full solution to the problem (although
it helps); the interviewer wants to know how you think, whether or not you can
code decently, and if you test. (You prove the last part by running an example
through your code while talking about it to find and fix any bugs.)

Check out Cracking the Coding Interview ([https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-
Coding-Interview-Programming...](https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-
Interview-Programming-Questions/dp/0984782850)) for more of this. It's a very
good book. Pairing its problems with an actual whiteboard and a timer is a
close approximation to a real interview.

------
zapperdapper
Looks like you have some good pointers there.

Having done quite a bit of interviewing for programmers/tech writers I would
say most people are not natural with live coding and whiteboard work. I
personally was lost without Emacs and a compiler to hand. My last white-
boarding session that was part of an interview was just horrible (writing Java
code on a whiteboard) - I did get the job though so even if it's painful all
is not lost.

Like anything though you get better with practice (as you are doing). If
you've got a whiteboard at home I would do impromptu sessions where you write
up say tree creation and traversal, doubly-linked lists or whatever is
appropriate for the job. If you've got a coder friend you can run things by
that's even better.

Also, make sure your GitHub page has got some meat there.

Good luck!

------
pryelluw
Shoot me an email to pryelluw@gmail.com and ill interview you for free. I used
to do hiring at my last job. :)

------
PaulHoule
Click on my user link and send me an email and I can help you out.

------
probinso
have you practiced?

You can get super cheap "panel board" (will last ~ 1 year of use for 12$)

(if in US found at home depot)

Practice. Solve problems on a whiteboard. Set one up.

~~~
probinso
if you stumble a lot, then first practice by transcribing code snippets that
you've authored. This will give you a feel for how pseudo your pseudo code
should be.

Once you are used to writing code by hand, try solving standard interview
problems.

Final task will be learning to verbally communicate during this, at that point
its useful to ask for help.

------
fershey
Check out www.10xclub.io

