FAILing the interview

It is that time again to do interviews and find a new job. And we all know the troubles that come with interviews, the biggest one is REJECTION.

5 years ago, when I was going through this, rejection was killing my confidence. Nowadays, my confidence is more intact but still, the negativity infiltrates into your mind, sadly.

Today's interview was LIVE coding, and believe me, they didn't want to see HOW I think, they just wanted me to code in front of them.

One of the 2 questions was to draw a triangle with '*'. It is very simple, right? But the catch was that I had 10 minutes and I could execute the code only one time, which is the opposite of how I code, because I like to visualize what I code while I am coding, that is actually my forte when I debug code.

Surely I failed it, because when they take away your "superpower" you become an ordinary person.

After the interview, I sat down and tried to do that task. In 3 minutes, with about 3 executions, I finished the task. In the first execution, I saw a flat line, in the second execution, I made a half triangle, and with the last execution it was the full triangle. I'll paste my code in PHP, and later I did it in Python and JS, just for the fun of it:

PHP

<?php$height = 5;$added = 1;$output = '';for ($i = 0; $i < $height; $i++) {    $output .= str_repeat(" ", $height - $i - 1);    $output .= str_repeat("*", $i + $added);    $output .= PHP_EOL;    $added++;}echo $output;

Python

n = 5added = 1for i in range(n):    output = ' ' * (n - i - 1) + '*' * (i + added);    added += 1;    print(output);

JavaScript

const n = 5;let output = '';let added  = 1;for (let i = 0; i < n; i++) {    output += ' '.repeat(n - i - 1);    output += '*'.repeat(i + added);  output += '
'    added++;}console.log(output);

This reminded me that not all tech interviewers know what they are doing, so you need to not take things personally or let it affect your self-esteem or confidence.

This is not an EGO cry from my side. I am not the BEST developer nor am I ever gonna be nor do I want to be. I don't eat/breathe/drink programming all day long everyday. I just got a little baby girl and she means the world to me. I do programming because I enjoy it and I make a living from it.

I just want more accurate ways to measure a developer's skill/experience. Some companies are there already, kudos to them, but some other companies are terrible at it.

But I guess, at the end of the day, this company gonna find another developer, and I will find another company. So the problem persists, because it is not a CRITICAL problem. But I can see more "sensitive" people getting harmed by this, especially new developers and junior level devs. I wouldn't want them to go through that Hell of Impostor Syndrome and Confidence issues.

I hope you can find my article and take solace in it. Take a deep breath, say positive things to yourself. Learn from bad interviews, also learn from GOOD interviews that you failed, I surely did. GO study, do tasks, do hackerrank, read about SOLID, design patters, and so on. Eventually, you will pass an interview and the bad days will be behind you.