Why do technical interviews seem so intimidating?

[hotz]

I've been looking around for better opportunities, mostly to improve my financial situation.

It almost feels like I get anxiety at the thought of the technical assessment part of the interview process. Is this normal?

Most of my projects have gone to production and are successful, so I am capable/competent. I just rely on intuition to solve problems, I don't remember theories/algorithms verbatim.

[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 → romanhn]

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.

[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.

[brudgers]

An interesting podcast on hiring engineers that talks about interviewing, http://blog.ycombinator.com/hiring-engineers-with-ammon-bart...

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

Good luck.

[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.

[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.