Ask HN: Bad at Interviewing

I’m really not good at the live programming sections of interviews regardless of how much I practice. I’m already a nervous person but having someone watch me try to solve a problem just makes me forget how to think it seems.

I also have a hard time with how much variance is in each interview. Sometimes it’s a question of do you know how to use this library / can you google (without using AI responses) how to use it before the interview is over, other times it’s just a straight up leetcode question, I’m not good at either.

I’ve been working as a SWE for 8 years and always gotten above average performance reviews at every company I’ve been at, so I’m confident I can do the job if I’m given the chance, but it’s really tough for me to actually prove my worthiness in the interview stage.

Is there anything I can do to improve this skill? I already invest quite a bit of time into practicing problems but something about the time constraint or someone monitoring me really has a huge impact on me for some reason. I thought this would get better with practice but it seems to have not and to be frank it’s exhausting always feeling the need to “be ready” for interviews

4 points

・

biskquickest

・

8 hours ago

2 comments

pas256 ・ 7 hours ago

How do you do at other parts of the interview? The background interview where you talk about a technical project from your past, or the behavioral interview where you talk about situations you have been in before and how you reacted?

If you are feeling confident after those, and it is just the live-coding session, I'd suggest being upfront about it and asking for a different type of assessment. Ask for a take home assignment, or ask to be left alone to complete the task, and then review the code with the interviewer where you can explain all of the tradeoffs you made and why. The better companies are open to making accommodations for candidates, so if they are not open to this, that is a sign of how rigged the thinking at that company may be.

On the other hand, if you are struggling with the other interview types as well, you may need to dip into some psychological tricks to get your head in the right mindset. One counter-intuitive thing to do is to tell yourself that you do not want this job. If you can convince yourself to believe that, it will lower the pressure you may be putting on yourself and open you mind to think more clearly.

  • biskquickest ・ 7 hours ago

    Thanks for your reply, funnily enough the system design / previous project portions of interviews usually go much better for me. This last interview I did I got a very high score on the system design conversation but failed the coding portion miserably.

    I’m not sure why that is the case for me, it’s almost like because it’s supposed to be more of a conversation I loosen up more instead of what I usually get during my live coding interviews which is “here is the link, good luck!” then silence from the interviewer for 45 min.

    I have observed in the past that I’m worried about not communicating enough and communicating too much during the live coding portions, so that is definitely an extra hoop to jump through that’s hard for me to not think about during the interview