The future co-worker
This is an interviewer who can put themselves in your shoes the minute they walk-in. They understand what an important day this is for you and the nervousness you carry. They know that you have done incredible amounts of hard work and won’t try to belittle you in any way. They are here because they want to solve the problem with you. As you go through your interview, whether you aced it or not, you will come out of it feeling like you had a good conversation where you learnt something. This is the kind of interviewer who is great to work with during and after the interview. Although you might think that you are the only one being evaluated, it is a great opportunity for you to evaluate whether you can see yourself working with this person in the future.
Now that we’ve gotten the best package, let’s look at some of the not-so-good scenarios that can happen.
The one who wouldn’t look at you
Sometimes interviewers have been told to type every little conversation that goes on in the room. Although there are some great note-takers who aren’t constantly distracted, most of them in this category don’t care to look at you much. The typing is distracting, there is no eye contact, mostly they aren’t listening nor trying to have an organic conversation with you.
If you had to interview with someone like that, don’t be afraid to take up space in the room. If you start feeling stressed or the interview feels too cold, politely let them know that the typing is a little distracting to your thought process. You can also pause a few times and wait to get their attention before proceeding so that they don’t miss out on the key points that you are mentioning during your interview. It is important for you to stay assured that you are not responsible for their distracted state no matter how boring the question is, so go about it confidently because this day is more important to you than it is for them.
The one who wants you to be a mind-reader
Some interviewers do not let you solve a problem using your own methods. This could be because they aren’t aware of more than one way of solving a problem or they aren’t able to understand how you’re trying to solve it.
Let us always assume the latter because if you are standing there judging the interviewer for not knowing multiple ways of solving a problem, it won’t benefit you in any way. This can create a communication barrier between the both of you. This is when you can take a step back and try to best explain your algorithm with a few examples. Place emphasis on why your approach might work. Pay attention when the interviewer counters it. In some cases, they might expect you to go for the most efficient solution right away. You have probably only come up with a brute force one and can’t really think of how it can be improved. When you feel stuck in this state, explain that you haven’t quite gotten there but you are hoping to get started with a basic solution and iteratively improve upon it once you see the caveats. Most interviewers will be fine with this approach.
The one with the unnecessary arrogance
An interviewer’s job is to make a case for someone who exhibits potential to be a good developer and fit for the company and its culture. Unfortunately, some of them try to check if you are as smart as them, or pick a super difficult problem. This might mostly be a junior developer whose idea of Software Development hasn’t grown beyond solving difficult Leetcode questions yet.
Such an interview scenario can be extremely stressful and the worst outcome is you experiencing a mental block. Try to pick a few easy example cases and manually solve the problem. See if you can turn that into a brute force algorithm that can work for the most common cases. You can then discuss edge cases and improve your algorithm. At any point, an interviewer should not try to trick you or turn it into a stress interview. If that starts to happen, take a few deep breaths and start over. Remember that it’s okay to sometimes not solve it at all. There are thousands of different problems out there and it’s completely okay to be clueless when an overly difficult problem gets presented to you. It was just one of those unlucky days.
The silence of the lambs
This type of interviewer can make you feel nervous throughout the interview by being silent. You may feel stuck at various points on whether your approach is right, waiting for cues to proceed or step back. A good interviewer will make sure to guide you and let you know when you are going in the wrong direction, but sometimes they might not. If this happens, calm yourselves and give it your best shot. Start explaining how you plan on solving the problem and once you are done, stop and explicitly ask whether you can go ahead and code it up. Get to this point as quickly as possible so that you have enough time to brainstorm an alternate approach if your first one doesn’t work out. Be aware of time and allocate a comfortable chunk of time to code the solution.
Hope this post helped you to mentally prepare yourselves to interview with any type of interviewer whom you might encounter. Good luck with your upcoming interviews 🙂
That Girl Coder 