How to Prepare for Your Technical Interview
Have you got a technical interview coming up? Whether you’re experienced or not, that interview can be a hurdle between you and your dream role. Here are tips on how you can better prepare.
I went through quite a number of technical interviews while looking for a job. One thing I realized by the first interview was that you certainly had to come prepared and you had to put your best foot forward.
From listening to recruiters and hiring managers, you are better off declining an interview than taking one, fumbling, and then getting rejected.
You can’t wing the technical interview
The technical interview tests how you tackle real-world problems like the ones you might face once you have the job, as well as benchmarks the breadth and depth of your skillset and general knowledge using coding challenges and word problems.
Different companies have different means of testing your skills, so it is important to do a lot of research about the specific company and their interview styles.
As someone who has been on both sides of the table — as an interviewee and now an interviewer, here are seven tips on how to ace your next technical interview!
1. Understand who your interviewer is
It is an important step to ask who will be interviewing you. Nowadays, the names and bio of the interviewers are included in the interview invitation email, which gives you a chance to take about 30 to 45 minutes to go through their Linkedin profiles to get a sense of who they are.
For example, let’s say you have an interview with a Senior Data Scientist who has extensive experience in building tree-based models, this information may guide you towards additionally preparing for questions around that topic.
Your ability to speak the “same language” as your interviewer could be what sets you apart.
2. Focus on fundamentals when preparing
The fundamentals are just as important as knowing the tough things.
For example, in a data science interview, your ability to articulate your answers to basic questions like “what do you use to measure accuracy in a regression model” or “why will you use median over mean when doing some basic reporting” may make the difference.
3. Be prepared to show your creative side
When you are posed with a question, either through a coding challenge or word problem, feel free to explore your creativity.
It might be easier to give a standard textbook response, but don’t forget that the interviewers have probably heard the solution stated that way multiple times.
I understand that it may be easier to show creativity in take-home coding problems or questions, but continuous practice with this can help hone your problem-solving skills.
Even if you are not 100% accurate, your attempt will show the interviewer that you are a quick thinker and a great problem solver.
That said, when the questions are unclear, don’t hesitate to clarify, and as you go through your solution, make sure you are taking your interviewer along with you.
4. Get study resources
This point cannot be overemphasized.
There are a lot of resources everywhere, from YouTube to LeetCode to Medium articles like this one. These sites provide you with questions and many times solutions on how to approach and ace the technical interview.
Here are some of my top sites for Data Science:
Another thing you can do is reach out to people in your field to get their top resources.
5. Practice, practice, practice
Give yourself enough time to get ready for the interview.
A mistake I made in the past was getting too excited and fixing an interview right after I got an invitation. The issue with this is you don’t get enough time to calm down, do your research, and properly practice.
I have learned to give myself at least a week to properly prepare for technical interviews.
6. It’s okay to not know everything
Remember that during your interview there are some things you may actually not know. If you find yourself in this situation, you can let your interviewer know and then give it your best shot.
What I always say is don’t act like you know it and then throw in the wrong words.
Instead, you can ask clarifying questions to see if that might give you more clues to the answer.
Once you have made an attempt to answer the question based on your understanding of the additional information your interviewer may have provided, you can mention that you’ll be sure to look into understanding whatever was asked a bit more after the interview.
7. You CAN’T wing your interview
Once you understand this at the core, you will not fail to prepare.
In a technical interview, if you believe that showing up is enough, even though you are awesome and excellent at what you do, you may be thrown off by simple questions — not because you don’t know it, but because you are not prepared.
You should trust that interviewers can smell unpreparedness from the way you respond to your questions.
I was speaking to a more experienced friend of mine in the Data Science field who just went through a series of interviews and he told me he had to go back to learn the basics of statistics and coding.
In his words he said:
“even though we do all this fancy models everyday, you can actually forget the basics and the why”
The tips I have shared here can apply to any field that has a technical component, and technology doesn’t always have to be coding or programming.
For example, if you apply for a strategic finance or product management role, you will have a component of the interview that focuses on the core terms within that industry or space.
Here are the main points again:
- Understand who your interview is
- Focus on fundamentals when preparing
- Be prepared to show your creative side
- Get study resources
- Practice, practice, practice
- It’s okay to not know everything
- Best believe that you can’t necessarily wing it
All the best with your next interview!
