The first part was a system design interview. I had never done one of these, and my experience up to this point was basically working on small scale web apps at a local software development agency.

Next I continued on to an algorithm-focused white board exercise. It was something about trees, but again I was not able to articulate anything. I remember saying something like, "Recursion is bad", and immediately I could sense that that was a mistake. What I meant was that with Python you have to be mindful of recursion because you can get that "Maximum call stack size exceeded" error.

Next we ate lunch. I attempted to engage in conversation with an engineer by asking her where she had studied. She replied, and I then made the mistake of speaking negatively about the school that I knew was her school's competitor. Basically my attempt at comradery fell flat and I just looked like an idiot. The thing is that in reality I could care less about people's schools. I was just trying to be conversational, but failed.

After lunch, I had a meeting with a person who held a high-ranking position in the engineering department, possibly a director. His spacious office with a window indicated his significance. During the meeting, he inquired about my academic background and what I had learned in school. This particular part of the interview left me with the impression that I had failed to learn anything of value.

He had me work on some problem about a "Bipartite Graph" - Like prove that this graph is bipartite, or something like that. He had me do it on his window with expo markers, and it was taking me so long to get through this problem he actually left the room for a good 5 minutes and left me in there to mull it over.

The final part of the interview was with the front-end people. I don't remember much about this other than talking about React, since it was the hot new thing at that point.

By the end of the day, I knew I had done a bad job, and I felt very dumb. I remember emailing the guy shortly after leaving, basically apologizing for doing such a bad job, and that, "I promise I will do a good job if you choose to hire me".

I still cringe thinking about this experience, but it's also kind of funny that I could have this type of experience at a company who literally made an interviewing platform. I thought that was pretty ironic. I recognize that I did a pretty bad job, but nobody deserves to feel like I did after that interview.

I froze up. I couldn't talk and think at the same time. I didn't have the skillset for doing this in a very intense scenario. In my case, I was homeless and needed a job ASAP. Every interview felt like life or death to me.

First one I was asked to reverse a string in C. I hadn't done C in a few months. I froze up on syntax. I looked like an idiot who couldn't do it.

I could imagine many people who have never experienced this format (or haven't experienced it much) would easily freak out and look stupid as bricks like I did.

I've since done over 200 technical interviews (as the interviewee) and I usually sweep. Still fail at FAANG but I always get the solutions. (Even the leetcode hard ones) Just not sure why I fail but cest la vie.

I blanked. They just handed me the laptop and didn't even tell me it was a test. There were some comments at the top of a few javascript files and like an idiot I answered the questions verbally. The two devs just sat their smirking at each other like they'd won at something.

I'm not averse to tech interviews, but I do not enjoy the "look at how smart we are that we caught you out" attitude that comes with them. I'm shit at crosswords, that doesn't make me illiterate.

I've since been keeping an eye on their work and now I get to feel smug because it's been universally panned.

I also had to sit a test for what I call "the worst agency in the world" (AKQA and after 7 hellish months there I'm happy to stand by and put my name to that assessment, they're simply awful). I forgot to specify the radix in a call to parseInt. It was the only flaw and while they didn't make a big deal out of it, the interviewer was clearly pleased with himself for finding it. They then proceeded to ask ZERO questions about why I'd coded the test the way I had. Which is a shame, they might have learned something.

In my experience, there's nothing wrong with tech interviews, but there's a lot wrong with the people administering them. If I want to know wether a dev knows what they're talking about, I ask them to explain something they've already coded. If they can explain it, they understand it, and I usually learn something to boot. Everybody wins.

I am an experienced dev, but couldn't tell you my birthday in a technical interview. All the rest of the interview is fine, I only 'freeze' up at technical questions.

Sucks.

But I blew my first coding interview both in the interview itself -- in which I repeatedly blanked out and froze -- and in my failure to show the company my best work (they asked what I was hacking on and so I showed them a half-assed blog engine I was rolling using the remnants of another project when I should have shown my more polished work.).

This interview was so bad that I cannot yet bring myself to try it again, despite spending lots of time polishing up on algorithms and data structures. Up to now, I had never experienced performance anxiety of any type -- I did very well on interviews and standardized tests like the GRE. Yet now I'm petrified of programming interviews.

By local standards, I'm a pretty good programmer (by HN standards I'm probably average). And what I lack in knowledge I made up for with enthusiasm and persistence. I've got a bunch of code of varying quality on Github, including small contributions to several very large open source projects and a moderately popular open source project that I created and maintain myself.

I'm also limited by the fact that due to my family situation, I can only consider remote jobs at the moment. But by far my main hurdle is this fear of programming interviews.

I'll definitely be taking a look at this. Maybe this will help be break through my mental block.

I was given a take home problem under the guise that they did not do live whiteboard coding interviews. I did the problem, and it was impressive enough to get me on the phone. I was impressive enough to get from the phone to an on-site.

What do you think happened at the on-site? Yup, standard whiteboard coding interviews. Nervousness and pressure means I didn't have a very good showing, although I did solve the problems.

Was told that very day that I wasn't going to be a good fit. Any feedback from the interview where we finally did talk about my solution to the take home problem would not have been taken into consideration as I was told it wasn't a fit right after that interview and nothing was said between the two people.

I really do think that the only thing they found out about me was that I can not do those sorts of problems while nervous and under pressure. What they didn't find out was anything about my actual abilities.

2. I froze again during a live coding interview when I was asked to correct code under test for a coin change problem. I couldn't get over the fact that someone was judging me based on what they were seeing live and I messed it up so badly that I told them I'm not good at live coding and left it at that >_<

FFS after ~15 years in the field having worked on firmware all the way up the stack one would think I'd be great at throwing out solutions to trivial problems off the top of my head...nope not my brain :D

I've found for myself that there's a massive difference in how someone approaches live coding. If it's a colleague or even my entire team I know that we are doing this together because we have a common goal and will support each other...unlike in an interview where it's set up to be antagonistic and that throws me off completely.

That was the entire phone screen, and they failed me. This still burns me years later because it was such an obvious communication failure on their part - if you're one of the rare interviews that actually require me to write working code, you better be darn sure to mention that upfront, rather than 5 minutes before the end of the hour! - and yet I was the one who failed.

I asked for a do-over and they said no. Oh well...

1. An in-person phone round interview at one of the social media Companies in the Bay Area. The interviewer came 10 min late, gave me a problem and was then busy as hell with his phone. At least he had the courtesy to tell me that there was a prod issue he was engaged in, but still, not cool.

The problem was tough as hell, and I didn’t solve it. There was no help/prompts either. I was curious about the source of the problem - and the person told me that it was his own personal twist on a problem from competitive programming competitions.

So, basically, unless you are a seasoned competitive programmer, you are screwed. Again, not cool.

2. An interview at one of the Big Banks in SF for a Engg role. One of the interviewers asked me about my current job and was visibly upset when I said it was cool and nice. Then they followed that up by being disinterested and openly hostile in the rest of the interview.

Didn’t get the job and dodged a bullet. But I still don’t understand what his problem was. Since when is it necessary to hate and abuse your current job when you look for the next one?

I was really nervous, and since it was a phone interview, I tried to speak my thought process, which didn't quite work out due to me constantly stammering. So I just took to typing all the time so that my interviewer wouldn't think I was taking too long coming up with a language or copying answers. I started making silly mistakes like using `int sum=0` in python. I took the input as a number, converted it to a string, and then further converted it back to a number, and did mathematical operations on it, trying to solve the problem. Every time I thought I did it, it would get stuck in another case.

Ultimately, the interviewer deleted 50 lines out of my 60-line code, and just added a print statement on a variable I was already using for storing things temporarily, which turned out to be the correct answer.

Needless to say, I blew the interview. I haven't done an interview since, and I'm gonna be up for it very soon. I'm not sure if I'd do better this time, but I'd be ready with a glass of water, and try to be as relaxed as possible.

Having said that - over the years, I now much prefer conducting interviews where interviewer and candidate walk through a problem, figuring out a solution together; they provide much more insight into a candidate compared to rote memorization/whiteboard tasks like "Implement a linked list". So, in the end, I've learned to appreciate their approach.

I once had an interview for a front-end midlevel position. I had some prior front-end experience in another framework, but mostly worked on midteir and vendor products. I was notified the morning of my interview that it wasn't just a regular interview but a code screen and I could use any language/tools/etc that I wanted. I got there and found out that was not the case - he was not following HR's procedures. So he hands me a Mac (which I'm not familiar with), tells me to use Angular (which I've never used), in Webstorm (I played around with it once), and tells me to build a page to upload a CSV file and display the contents in a table on the page. I have 30 minutes to do it, and then I'll get 30 minutes to dress it up in CSS. Needless to say, I bombed it. I was sort of impressed with myself that I had it almost functional, but yet ashamed at my abysmal evaluation. He said I didn't do well and that he was looking for an expert. Shouldn't you open a senior posting if you want an expert? I asked him why he gave me an interview if my resume listed none of the technologies, with my cover letter stating that I was looking for a change and wanted to learn new technologies. His answer was that maybe I knew the tech from personal projects. I had Android personal projects listed on my resume, so why would I have left off other ones more pertainate to the position? My guess is he was too lazy to read and understand the resume and cover letter, not to mention ignoring HR's instructions. What a waste of both our time (moreso mine since he was on his laptop most of the time).