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How to deal with high pressure interview questions?

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Anonymous User at Taro Communitya year ago

I recently encountered an interview. The interviewer seems not quite willing to cooperate at the first beginning, like hiding the camera, not responding to my answers, and just shooting another question right after. Within 1-hour interview, the interviewer spend 40 minutes around behavior questions, most likely: "what's the most critism feedback you recently received?"/ "what's the biggest mistake you've done?"/ "give an example of when you think you received unfair criticism?". The interviewer also asked questions like "what's private cache/ global cache"? "What's the replacement for sharding?" still I do not have any clue about this sort of question. The rest of the tech interview, it's a dp question which I think it's quite challenging to accomplish in 20 minutes. I wonder what is this interview about. Is this kind of a high-pressure interview? Is this kind of interview that we should expect?

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(2 comments)
  • 3
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    Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
    a year ago

    Honestly, I think this interviewer is just bad. From my understanding, you had a single round that was literally all 3 core interview question types?

    • Behavioral (talking about criticism)
    • System design (replacement for sharding)
    • DSA (DP)

    Is this kind of a high-pressure interview?

    It's high-pressure in that it's trying to cram way too many signals into one round.

    Is this kind of interview that we should expect?

    The vast majority of interviewers are bad; most companies don't invest nearly enough resources into making sure that their interview process is actually decent and treats the candidate well. We actually gave a masterclass on how to be an interviewer that doesn't suck to help raise a new generation of non-sucky interviewers.

    All that being said, I wouldn't take this too personally or worry about it too much. Interviewing is just a giant spaghetti-fest. Do the best you can, and keep your chin up. You'll almost certainly run into a lot of garbage interviewers along your journey, but if you keep striving to improve yourself and learn from your mistakes, you'll eventually get something nice 😊

  • 3
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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    4 months ago

    Something that has become clear to me over the past few months running Taro: engineers tend to overshare when they land in a high-pressure situation.

    If this type of interview happens again, I have two concrete pieces of advice: