Each interview followed a similar pattern: discuss your work, tell me about [software engineering topic] and your experience with it, then, let’s do a coding problem.

Sometimes I solved a problem quickly, and the interviewers made the problem more complicated or gave me a completely separate one. I was not asked riddle-type questions or typical HR-type questions like “What’s your biggest weakness?”

Between interviews, interviewers talk to each other and send emails to others in the interview loop. Yes, they are talking about you behind your back. They will tailor future questions to cover areas missed by previous interviewers or to follow up on a perceived weakness. Also, not every interviewer is on the team you’re interviewing for. I liked this aspect because it gave me an opportunity to learn more about other groups.

In the first interview, the coding problem was to generate a well-known dataset. I first considered how to generate the nth iteration of the dataset, but the interviewer quickly steered me toward solving iterations 1-n, which is much easier.

I went over the algorithm in my head and out loud before writing any code. Then, I wrote the simplest, naive code that I could think of. I immediately saw some inefficiencies and worked to address them. The interviewer prodded me slightly toward the answer she was looking for, and I would have gotten there.

In the first interview, the coding problem was to generate a well-known dataset.

I first considered how to generate the nth iteration of the dataset, but she quickly steered me toward solving iterations 1-n, which is much easier.