Ask HN: Good, experienced engineer but suck at interviews. Looking for a coach

[throwaway13000]

I am an experienced engineer(10+) working as software engineer.

I know all the CS basics and concepts. I can 80% of the puzzles/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.

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.

All you have to mostly do is curate a few questions in my weak areas and pester me to solve them.

Something like youneedaboss.com but for software engineering interviews.

Please let me know how I can contact you. If you have experience hiring people before, it is even better!

My contact is in the profile.

[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/

[throwaway13000 → itengelhardt]

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.

[AnimalMuppet]

Some questions for you:

What are your weak areas/blind spots?

What kind of programming do you do?

Where are you located?

[throwaway13000 → AnimalMuppet]

>>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(N2) 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(N2) 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.

[AnimalMuppet → throwaway13000]

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 → AnimalMuppet]

>find companies that interview with a different approach,

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

[throwaway13000 → jaredsohn]

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.

[throwaway13000 → AnimalMuppet]

You are right that most of the work does not involve O(N^2) but what can we do. Customer is king. These companies are my customer (in the sense that they pay me money and I write code for them!) They are free to come up with all sorts of stupid ways guage applicants. Either I fight the system or I work hard to get out of it :D