Comment by ayaros
1 day ago
I just had an interview like this and I don't think I did well. It was a dumb stupid coding problem that, naturally, should have been easy, and it took me forever. I honestly don't know if I'll hear back from them at this point. :/
At least reading this post has helped me regain some of that lost self-esteem. Thanks for sharing it. <3
Even with practice, dev interviews are a crapshoot. Sometimes you will knock it out of the park, only to fail at the next round because of something silly. And other times you don't do anything special and get moved to the next round (or even hired). I'd just keep interviewing and try not to take the interviews seriously.
What was the problem, just out of interest?
It was just "represent a checkerboard data structure" and then "write a function to check whether moves were valid" and then another one to check if the game is over. And my brain just felt like it was trudging through molasses. :/
Just don't allow that to feed back into your judgment of your actual qualities as a person or as an engineer. It's not just that this sort of thing is a poor method for hiring people, but it's a shitty basis for evaluating engineers or people in general.
Interviewing is a skill unto itself and even with all the stars aligned you'll have good days and bad days. It's still a numbers game and that's OK.