I've applied online and met a recruiter at a university event.

I'm an Electrical Engineering student interested in working as a software engineer. I didn't take any classes in my program for this purpose, therefore I self-educated myself. I bought books, took online classes, and enrolled in a few additional CS courses at my university.

With that said, I had to focus a lot on learning what any CS student must know, and I did that, but it didn't make me a perfect candidate yet.

In my first and only phone interview, I managed to answer almost all of the questions. However, I found that I lacked the ability to be a great user of the Java API and to effectively code solutions. For example, I chose an array as my data structure for a solution, whereas perhaps if I had chosen a linked list, I would have demonstrated that I'm a stronger programmer.

They called me three days after my phone interview to notify me that I was not chosen for the second on-site interview. However, the recruiter mentioned they were impressed by my resume, my analytic skills, and my general knowledge. He said I need to practice coding more and I will be a great fit.

He told me he'd contact me again at the end of the year and schedule another interview without me even asking for it.

So, my advice would be this:

Build a very strong knowledge of your preferred programming language. You have to show that you can utilize it the best way possible.

I was asked to sort an array of integers where all zeros come in front, and the rest come later. After successfully solving it, the interviewer started making it harder bit by bit.

What if we want the 7s? What if we want prime numbers? What...

Finally, he asked me what if we were dealing with objects instead of integers.