Hacker News Reader

Comment by z3ugma | Hacker News Reader

Is there someone you trust who has been a mentor to you at one of your past jobs? Send them a note and ask them to mock interview you. People love being asked favors and for their opinion.

You sound unsure and defeated in your post. Were you feeling confident the day of the interview, or do you think you seemed desperate for the job?

I will say that all the best technical interviews I have had are ones where I spoke in short sentences, was able to end on a point rather than rambling, and left plenty of time in my answers to ask questions of the reviewer and demonstrate curiosity.

View on HN

I feel defeated now primarily because I really thought that I was going to get an offer on this job, so it kind of felt like a punch in the stomach when I got rejected this morning.

I think I was feeling confident enough during the interview, but it's entirely possible that some of my cynicism bled through in my intonations in the Zoom call.

I do tend to be long winded when I speak, so maybe that is working against me. I'll actually take that in mind.

Speaking as someone who has done a lot of interviewing of candidates - being long winded or an otherwise poor communicator is one of the most common reasons to reject someone.

It's definitely worth practicing to be concise and clear in your responses (and don't waffle on - something I'm guilty of). Learn when to stop talking too.

It's just tough for me, because I kind of take pride in being accurate and technical questions often have a lot of edge cases and caveats that I feel compelled to point out because I don't want to say inaccurate stuff.

But of course that can go onto infinity; at some point you need to summarize and accept you can't be 100% accurate. I guess I need to figure out how to strike a balance between "blathering on" and "hand-waving away details". I have no idea how to do that but that might be a good thing to get out of mock interviews.

You can just refer to the edge cases or caveats (so it's clear you are aware of them) and let the interviewer follow up on them if they want to. This makes the interview a bit more conversational and helps build rapport with the interviewer.

That's generally what I do, I bring things up just to handwave them away and acknowledge that they're there.

The problem is, of course, that even handwaving things away, there's still a near-infinite number of potential caveats for any given subject, and I always feel a compulsion to list all of them. I did bother a friend of mine last night in order to get him to tell me how much of my rambling is tolerable so hopefully I have a better handle on it now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com