Generic Tips and Strategies for Tech Interviews

The goal of this article is to provide the reader with a set of general tips and guidelines that might give him/her an added advantage while taking a Tech interview. This is a very short read where I have tried my best to describe all the strategies that did and did not work for me during the various interviews I have taken over the course of my career in the Financial Industry and Tech. It’s very helpful if one is able to stay focused and motivated during the job search process as, often times, it turns out to be a marathon, not a sprint. The immeasurable beauty of Northern California was the source of my motivation

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Taking an interview in the Tech industry is a nerve wrecking process. Preparing for Tech company interviews is a very time consuming process as the bar for hiring a candidate in a Tech company is very high. Hence, the candidate is required to provide the interview panel with a lot of data points in order to meet that high bar. As a result it helps if a candidate is very well prepared when he or she is taking the interview. A large part of this interview preparation process is to have a clear understanding on what is expected from a candidate at every round of the interview and access to the right resources that can help the candidate reach those expectations as quickly as possible. Please see my other articles that lay out the resources that might be helpful in preparing for Live Coding, A/B testing and Causal Modeling and ML/Stats fundamentals.

However, despite one’s best efforts one might still end up getting a negative outcome. This is particularly true for some of the initial rounds of a Tech interview that is designed to eliminate candidates. It creates a lot of frustration in the candidate who has dedicated several weeks and months to prepare for the very coveted opportunity. I was in that situation in countless cases where, despite taking a really good interview (per my evaluation), I received a negative result. I always asked for feedback from the recruiter with respect to the areas of improvements. Sometimes, those feedbacks were helpful and often times they were very vague and generic. Here are some of the lessons I learnt from the many failures I have faced from various interviews over the course of my career.

1. Have a clear about the Interviewer’s expectations

Per my experience, the primary reason why I failed many interviews is because I was not able to provide the exact type of information the interviewer was looking for from the interview, even though my background and experience was a perfect match for that role. It’s crucial have good understanding of the team one is interviewing for from the interviewer’s introduction (if he or she is willing to talk about it at the beginning of the interview) or retrieve that information from the recruiter. It is also a very good idea to be clear about what type of skillsets are getting tested in that particular interview.

One example of a failed interview, from my end, was that of a Product Data scientist opportunity where the day to day job entailed simple excel based pivot table creations, stakeholder management and Dashboard creation. The interviewer asked me to describe how a Neural Network (NN)works and I ended up writing detailed equations of the forward and backward propagation of a fully connected NN with all the Linear algebra and Matrix notations that I had at my disposal. My objective was to demonstrate the depth of my knowledge in that field and the interviewer’s objective was to evaluate how would this candidate have a technical conversation with a non-technical guy (like a Product Manager) and with the rest of the team, comprised of people having excellent product sense but largely uncomfortable with mathematical notations. I was deemed to be too academically inclined for the team. I received this feedback privately from the interviewer, who was kind enough to respond to my message in LinkedIn. Personally, I felt relieved after learning this as the team did not seem like a very good fit to my future career goals. But I could have been a person who badly wanted that job and could have kept the explanation of a NN simpler and cleared the interview.

After I learnt this information, I always asked the interviewer directly, “Before starting the interview, I would like to ask how you are planning to evaluate me in this interview. I would keep that in mind and frame my responses accordingly”. Most interviewers were more than happy to provide me with that detail and I tried my best to be cognizant of that information during the entire time of the interview.

This is a very important topic for coding interviews. As mentioned in my article on resources to utilize for Live coding based Tech interviews, some interviewers offer hints to help the candidates. This is a very grey area as the interviewer might end up rejecting the candidate on the ground that the candidate had to be given too many hints. If the interviewee is not open to accepting the hint, then the interviewer might end up giving a feedback that would paint a picture that the candidate is not open to collaborating with their team-mates. A good practice is to start the interview by getting a very good idea on the interviewer’s expectation from the candidate and how the interviewer is planning on evaluating the candidate. That way, a candidate can be sure of how to interpret and respond to the hints. I have had many interviews where I pushed back the hints by saying something like “Will you be open to giving me a few minutes such that I can figure out a fix on my own ?”.

Lastly, I would like to end this section by narrating my experience regarding the lack of knowledge of some recruiters with respect to what type of interview a candidate might be taking in a specific instance. I have had quite a few experiences, where I was informed by the recruiter that the interview would involve behavioral questions/ past project discussion with the hiring manager and the interviewer turned out to be Senior or Staff level person from the team prepared to take a Technical/Coding interview. It is not always the recruiter’s fault as they are not often kept in the loop when the hiring manager decides what the interview will cover. If one encounters such a situation and if one is not prepared to take the technical interview, then it is always a good practice to not take the interview and request the interviewer to reschedule the interview instead of taking the technical interview without preparation and then fail it.

2. Present a Past Project using the STAR Format

Most of the Tech interviews involve at least one round where the candidate is asked to describe one of the past projects that’s most relevant for the position the candidate is interviewing for. Ideally, this should be a project that demonstrates end to end product experience of a candidate. This is a very crucial make or break question that is used to evaluate whether the candidate’s past experience, working style, people skills etc. are a good match with what the open position needs. It also gives the hiring manager a good sense of what the candidate can bring to the table.

After failing many interviews I have realized that the response to this question should be treated in the same manner in which politicians treat their speech. It should be previously written down in a clear, concise way using the STAR (Situation-Task-Action-Result) format, practiced multiple times before the interview and should be tailored according to the time that the candidate will have to respond to this question. In some interviews, the candidate will be given five to ten minutes to answer this question. In other interviews, the candidate will get thirty minutes to tackle the same question. The level of detail covered in that response, should be carefully designed such that the response should still preserve all the nuances of the project and still be short enough to be narrated in the given time window.

It is a good idea to practice delivering that response beforehand and track the amount of time one is taking to narrate the response. The answer to this question should be organized, should have enough details to help the the interviewer grasp the situation and should not have too many details to overwhelm the interviewer. This is an area where practicing the narration in front of a friend can help.

Also, the response should not sound rehearsed at the time of the interview. The interviewee must ensure that he or she is sounding as spontaneous as possible when he or she is delivering this response. That’s next to impossible, when one has rehearsed it so many times but unfortunately, that is the trick of the trade.

3. Give a Positive Vibe

Although this sounds trivial, it can give a candidate a marginal benefit over other candidates, particularly when the market is very competitive. Before taking an interview, one should think very carefully with respect to what type of message he or she would like the interviewer to take at the end of the interview.

I tried to appear as calm, composed and as confident as possible by carefully controlling my emotions from my responses. I wanted the interviewer to get the feeling, “Here is the candidate who is in control of herself, who is knowledgeable in this area and who can help the hiring manager and the team to do the necessary job”. Some of the strategies that worked for me in all my virtual interviews are:

• Sitting upright in a chair
• Making constant eye contact with the Interviewer
• Smiling as much as possible when I was not talking
• Having as much natural light as possible in the interview environment
• I personally felt more confident if I dressed up in a certain way. I always ensured that I was dressed in a way that made me feel confidant and in control of the situation. This is too personal and it worked for me. It might not work for everyone.

It gets very tricky if one is taking the interview in person. Here are some of the strategies that worked for me in an onsite interview environment.

• Making constant eye contact with the interviewer
• Smiling as much as possible
• Making sure that I am not suffering from body odor or bad breath on that particular day
• Trying to appear as funny and as interesting as possible. Initiating small talks with the interviewer always helped
• Once again, I dressed in a way that made me feel confident and proud of myself and my accomplishments

4. Showing enthusiasm, interest and eagerness

This is another one of those trivial details, that might give the reader an added edge, if everything else is taken care of. At the end of each interview, I used to ask the interviewers if they needed any other data points or any other clarifications that would help them make a more favorable decision towards me. At this time, I also displayed my interest and enthusiasm for the position once again. In most of my interviews, I used to get a very good idea on how the interview went from the interviewer’s response to this question. If the interviewer had already decided to not have me move forward, he or she would curtly avoid this question. Otherwise, the interviewer would almost always respond to this question with another follow up question. Per my experience, this is a very good strategy to tilt the interviewer towards the oneself.

5. Asking questions that are meaningful yet vague

Almost all the interviews end with the interviewer asking the candidate if he or she has any question for the interviewer. One should be very careful about what questions he or she is asking during this opportunity. The best strategy is to ask questions that shows one’s interest and enthusiasm in the team and the company but not give away too much of one’s own concerns or apprehensions about the position. This is particularly important if one is in bad need of the job one is interviewing for. Questions like “Tell me a bit more about your experience in this team and in this company” or “what are the opportunities of career progression in this role” are very safe questions.

Hope this helps the reader in formulating some appropriate strategies for the upcoming interview. Often times, after taking all precautions, the interview outcome is not what one had hoped for. In most of these situations, it is notabout the candidate or how he or she performed in the interview. It’s about many other factors outside of one’s control. These can range from factors like the pool of other candidates one is competing against (if the hiring manager has already met a stellar candidate before he or she is interviewing the reader then that position is already filled) or whether the interviewer was having a very bad day or whether the position was posted for the purpose of writing an existing employee’s green card petition (in that case the interviewer will try their level best to prove that the existing employee is better than the interviewing candidate) or whether the hiring manager is not sure of what he or she is looking for and is just interviewing a wide pool of candidates to see if a candidate really catches their eye or if the headcount suddenly got cancelled due to internal policies etc. In most cases, there were other candidates in the pool who were a better match. Although its easier said than done, I tried my best to not associate any emotion with an interview and not take interview outcomes personally. I tried to focus on the factors I had control over and keep on taking more and more interviews to get better at the game. I do not have the right words to comfort a candidate going through a frustrating job market season. However, I might attempt to point out the fact that one is not alone in that journey. Almost everyone in the Tech Industry has faced innumerable failures before taking that last successful interview. Good luck and all the best!