Day[42] Mock Technical Interview

It went just fine.

We started our third capstone today (more on that in another entry) and I was working on it from 9 am right up until my my mock technical interview at 3:15.

Actually, that’s not totally true.

I’m paired with Brandon on this capstone and I told him around 2:45 that I needed a break because my interview was coming up and my brain had turned to oatmeal. But there really are no breaks at Tech Elevator. I paced around in the main room trying to clear my head and ended up helping Argun figure out how to write a Session in his code. And, actually, I didn’t help him. I tried. But I have no idea how to write a Session unless I look it up.

At 3:15, Matt came out of the interview and I went in, to speak with Tom (Java) and the teacher-in-training Beth (who is sometimes referred to as Not-Tom (or, in code !Tom). They started role-playing immediately when I entered the room. They were no longer Java Tom and !Tom, but two HR Reps from StruggleBus Software. We had a conversation about why I like tech, what my plans are career-wise, and some basic drilling on computer science theory. I would say I basically aced it.

Actually, not aced. I wasn’t sure what Tom meant when he asked about data-structures and he had to prod me on with a hint.

Then the whiteboard. Tom shuffled the deck of questions thoroughly and then looked at each card as he picked out my problem specifically. I read the question a few times, wrote my answer and got it right. Basically.

Actually, I had a return inside the for-loop and it should have been outside, but I moved it to correct place after a hint.

Then, upon a re-reading of the question, my interviewers rephrased it slightly so that it became much, much harder. I sort of crashed and burned on that one.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Yes, I didn’t get the second iteration of the question right, but I was able to explain how I wanted to go about solving the problem in a logical way and to describe exactly what the challenges were in the problem in a manner that made me seem competent.

And Java Tom and !Tom told me so. Once they broke character.