Miserably Failed a Simple Interview with a Giant Tech and What You Can Learn From It
PS name of the firm at the end :D
When I started my journey in the Tech world I thought once I mastered a few technologies I would be done, and all I’d need to do as a token of acknowledgment was attend these interviews and everyone would roll their carpets to get me into their organization. Then I met the bitter truth …….
I applied to all the FANG companies and all the companies that I thought were doing great in this market, I applied and applied to all the positions that were even remotely associated with my profile, any small overlap and I am already into their workday portals with my resume.
From Day 1 — Day 5 (Phase: Naive Over Confidence getting shattered ):
I thought now that I’ve applied everywhere I’ll start getting the calls almost immediately. To my utter dismay, I got emails from the HR departments that politely said “Get down from your high horse we don’t need you”.
Slowly small disappointments started creeping in but I kept my hopes high cause I knew how good I was.
From Day 5 — Day 10 (Phase: Slow rebuilding ):
WoooW I got a few replies saying that my profiles match and they would like to talk to me, I found hope and my confidence grew. I killed it during the initial chat with HR and we scheduled a few interviews for the real test of my skills.
From Day 11— Day 15(Think I need to prepare):
One company whose share price has reached the sun, set up an interview with me and one company that’s a giant in retail told me my resume is being reviewed by internal teams.
Day 15 — Day 20 (False sense of preparation):
So I did the natural thing and ran a search “Interview question at company X” and to my shock, everyone said practice Leet Code. I thought about how difficult can it be and came to the conclusion about the harsh truth that I am really bad at these Leet Code questions and I absolutely suck at it. I started to see if I could solve any of this what I ended up doing was simply copying the answers from their discussion section and not really learning anything. I got a false sense of completion and accomplishment from those solutions.
I saw they needed Perl and Python so I practiced Perl which I’ve never worked on rather than working on what I falsely think is my strength which is Python at the end of my preparation I neither practiced Perl enough nor revised my Python. Read through the Cloud implementations that I’ve worked on, and thought I would be asked that whereas the Job description clearly said it was a developer position :(
D — DAY:
On interview day I met the manager who was supposed to interview me, initially, we chatted about the Job roles and responsibilities and I started getting confident that this sounded very easy.
Then bombshell — I had a https://www.hackerrank.com/ question about Getting all combinations of string that I needed to return. e.g. “abc” I needed to return a,ab,abc,ac,bc,c
I am sweating at this moment and I can’t seem to understand the problem correctly. I can’t seem to remember any of the syntax for Python that I’ve practiced so little. Start giving some stupid answer which absolutely doesn’t make sense and making all kinds of mistakes with the code itself I start feeling embarrassed and start typing crazy stuff on the screen I’ve already lost all my confidence and I see the interviewer realizing this is a lost cause but he still throws me a bone and asks me a Design question about how I would design a NFS and I completely take it the wrong way and start answering it as if I need to set it up in a VM rather than looking at it from a design’s perspective. I say some shit about /etc/exports and /etc/fstab and it doesn’t make sense to the interviewer and I see my self-respect in the toilet being flushed. The look in the eyes of the interviewer says “How did this person (me) even survive up until now in my career” and out of mercy the interview stops and I am devastated and also about to drop a tear. The interview ends and I put my head down for the next ten mins and think I am the most stupid person and how bad is my current situation. I get up, go for a walk and talk to myself as if I am the worst person in the world who is good for nothing come back and promise to myself I won't be in the situation ever again and will prepare properly for the future.
Lesson for you:
- If you think you don’t know the answer. Deeeeeeeeeeppppp Breath !!!!!!! if you have practiced enough you know the answer it is just nerves.
- READ THE JOB DESCRIPTION CLEARLY AND PREPARE FOR THAT ONLY.
- Practice your strengths on Leetcode.
- Study as if your life depends on it rather than just brushing past solutions that others have provided.
- Read the problem properly when it’s presented, rather than assuming things.
- Practice, Practice and more Practice and make sure you’ve also looked at System design questions.
Company Name: Nvidia
