Interviewing, Eye to Eye (The Jungle, Chapter 6)

Last time, I studied mercilessly for my face to face interviews.

It was now time to put the plan in action. 7 interviews scheduled over the course of 4 days.

Traveling

I slept terribly the night before my trip. I struggled to quell a deep and tragic fear in my heart that repeatedly whispered “you can’t do this.”

The next morning, I found a large group of ants loitering in my shower. They were soon dead, and I was on a flight to Phoenix, which would connect me to my flight to Philadelphia.

Except that my flight to Philadelphia was canceled, so I waited in line for two hours, and, upon learning that there were no seats available on any of the remaining flights to Philadelphia, decided to say the magic words to my US Airways customer service representative: “If you could get me anywhere near the east coast, that would be fabulous.”

In about an hour I was on a flight to Washington D.C.

It was nighttime as my plane approached Reagan National Airport. I saw the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and Capital building illuminated against the dark sky. It was beautiful, and formed a perfect harmony with the euphoria I felt during my favorite part of any flight: landing.

My bags were miraculously transported to the correct airport. I grabbed these gigantic satchels, filled to capacity with the finest shirts, slacks, and socks. I rented a white PT Cruiser and rocketed up 95 North until at last, around 4 am, I arrived in Philadelphia.

Questions

Here are some memorable questions that I was asked during my interviews:

• Can you explain how you’ve worked with Scrum and other Agile methodologies?
• Implement a Queue on the whiteboard.
• How do you feel about Ruby and Python compared to monolithic languages like Java?
• In Java, do you think that mutable numbers would be a good case for operator overloading?
• Describe a perfect day at work.
• Describe the differences between Windows and Linux.
• Write a method that converts a String to an Integer.
• Write a method that shuffles a deck of cards.
• Can you give an example of a design pattern that you have used?
• Describe how you think the design process should work.
• Write a method that detects if a String is a palindrome.
• Write a method that reverses the lines in a file.
• Are there any books that have influenced your career? What are some of them, and why?
• This position requires more than 40 hours a week. Is that a problem?
• Describe the facade pattern.
• How would you test an interface to an external system?

Atmosphere

By the time I walked into my 4th interview, I was discussing offers from previous encounters. This increased my confidence a great deal, but I was careful not to get too comfortable.

There were some jobs that I was more interested in than others, but I tried to forget about that during the interview process. You never know what’s going to happen.

Interesting Moments

I did well in most of my interviews, but I definitely had some moments where I underwhelmed my audience.

What are the differences between Ruby and Python?

Well, first off, the syntax is different.

Are there any two languages in which the syntax isn’t different?

Oh, uhh… not that I know of.

(Describes requirements of system). Now, I’d like you to give me a high-level design. Then tell me how much it’s going to cost.

OK… so I’m going to, uh…… hmm. You see, I’m kind of… uh, eh, yeah. Give me a minute to gather my thoughts here.

(Time passes, and I still have no clue where to begin. My brain is in a knot, I’m extremely light headed, and I become concerned that I may faint.)

I haven’t had much to eat today, and I’m having a very hard time thinking through this.

We’ve got some muffins in the kitchen. Hold on, I’ll grab you some.

Really? Thanks!

I eventually solved the problem in a satisfactory enough manner to receive a job offer — but man, what a disaster.

One manager that I spoke with asked every generic interview question in the book, one after another.

What is your biggest strength?

What is your biggest weakness?

Why do you want to work here?

Why should I hire you?

She was very nice, but I can’t imagine the interview was any less boring to her than it was to me. I had canned (yet mostly sincere) answers to all of these questions.

Results

I received job offers or inquiries about offers from 6 out of the 7 companies that I interviewed with.

I’m a perfectionist, so my main frustration is the one offer that I didn’t get. There isn’t a lot of mystery there — I made quite a few mistakes:

• I attempted an iterative solution for a problem in which recursion would have been much, much easier. In fact, using recursion didn’t even cross my mind.
• I didn’t consider memory limits when designing a program that dealt with reading files.
• I didn’t dig deep enough into a problem that I was asked to solve. I misunderstood what my interviewer was asking of me, and this required me to redo my entire solution.
• I didn’t have good rapport with my interviewers. They weren’t rude, the atmosphere was just a bit more stiff and dry than my other encounters. Maybe they lost interest once they decided that I wasn’t a good fit, or maybe I was frustrated by my inability to answer their questions correctly.

But why dwell on the negative? I had 6 other interviews that went very well.

Next time, I’ll discuss my post-interview negotiations.

category: career

tags: interviewing

next: Negotiating Job Offers (The Jungle, Chapter 7)

prev: Training for Interview Combat (The Jungle, Chapter 5)