Juniors — How To Prepare for the Technical Interview

Erik Andersen
3 min readSep 23, 2022
Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash

“Technical Interviews” are notoriously difficult to prepare for because the definition is so nebulous.

To some companies it means a live data structures & algorithms coding challenge, but to others it may mean a 10-hour take-home assignment. And to others it may simply be a Q&A session on a technical topic, or a simple white boarding exercise.

Or maybe it’s none of the above! 😅

But the principles of success are the same

And they are to recognize that -

Interviewing is not the interviewer’s full-time job

Meeting with candidates is usually one small part of a much broader scope of responsibility that a hiring manager is accountable for. This means that (in most cases) they will rely on free or widely available question sets and tools to administer the technical assessment.

And they will probably be weak at DS&A as well 😰

Experienced developers just use Google! Rarely do thy have to independently analyze and implement a solution to something like what’s found on Leetcode. And hiring managers? Even more rarely.

So in most cases they only know the answer to a DS&A problem because they looked it up before hand.

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Erik Andersen
Erik Andersen

Written by Erik Andersen

Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience. Also an independent coach, teacher, and public speaker. My opinions are my own

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