An experience with Pramp
A Review: what to expect from the free mock interview service
Pramp is a straightforward way to get live mock coding interviews, for free. It differs from hackerrank, leetcode, and the like, because you code while interacting with a live interviewer.
Here’s how it was for me: the process and my takeaways.
The process
Sign-up
I signed up a few days beforehand for a 2hr timeslot, but you can also just drop in whenever. When you sign up ahead of time, they immediately send you the problem that you’re supposed to ask, and an interactive editor that you can use to practice.
Interviewing
When you do show up, you’re held in a waiting area for up to a few minutes while they find your pair.
Then, you’re paired with someone and the question + interactive editor + video chat window opens up. One of you solves a problem while the other plays the part of “interviewer” (and gets to peek at hints + answers) then you swap roles. In my case we spent about 30 minutes on each problem, and ended an hour early. The problems were similar to leetcode problems, but I thought they were slightly lower quality — the built-in test cases weren’t very thorough (though at least not laced with hidden performance requirements like Leetcode’s), the explanations weren’t quite as clear, and the problems were a little “trick”ier, with one of them requiring a bit of an intuitive leap.
I ended up paired with someone who wasn’t very polished. It was instructive in the way that teaching is instructive. I didn’t steal any tricks from him, but I did make note of habits I would avoid (for example, reading the question out loud word-for-word, and then sliding awkwardly into silence as you read the rest of the question).
Debrief
After the interview, you’re each given a feedback survey to fill with info about your counterpart (pluses/minuses/would you pass them?). Some of this feedback is shared with your counterpart (tips) and some is not (pass/fail).
The Basics
Pros
- Real practice with the “talking out loud” and pressure of a live interview
- It’s free (at least for the first 6 interviews) and convenient
Cons
- Your interviewer will not be a professional interviewer, so they won’t be that great of an interviewer
- You have to spend the time to interview them in return
- I wasn’t a huge fan of the questions I was assigned (n=2).
Would I do it again?
Yes, I probably will do another Pramp interview or two to work the nerves out. But I’m also planning to use Tech Mock Interview and Evisors, which are $100–250 per interview, to put on another level of polish.
