5 Mistakes Software Engineers Make On Their Job Interview

Being a genius software engineer won't get you very far if you can't get past the interview. I asked some tech executives about common mistakes they see software engineers making during interviews, and how to avoid these pitfalls and impress whoever's sitting across the table.


1. Neglecting interview-specific practice.

According to Tigran Sloyan, CEO of CodeFights, "The #1 mistake developers make when preparing for technical interviews is not practicing using real interview questions. As a great developer you often think 'this is what I do for a living and I am good at it' so it’s tempting to walk into an interview without much practice. The reality is, interview questions you face at most companies are very far away from your day job which means you need deliberate practice using the types of questions you are going to be tested on."

"There are many examples out there that show this gap between 'what you get asked at an interview' and 'what your job duties are going to be'. Take a look at this interview question which often gets asked at companies like Amazon, Linkedin, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple. To solve it you need to understand the concept of Prefix Sums. If you have never heard of it before, good luck solving this during a technical interview with all the added pressures that come with having someone you just met sitting across the table from you and watching you intensely. The concept itself is not very difficult but it doesn’t come up that often in real-world scenarios so most professional developers have either not heard about it before or learned about it passingly in junior year of their Computer Science program."

2. Relying on technical skills as the golden ticket.

Dan Melnick, Chief Operating Officer at Reverb.com, says, "If you can nail the technical parts of an interview, such as a pairing code challenge, that’s great. But it doesn’t end there. The best candidates—who eventually go on to make the best team members—come prepared with smart questions that show that they’ve done their homework. Not only can this demonstrate that you understand tech’s broader impact on the company, it also showcases your communication skills. At the end of the day, coding is all about communication. A candidate could be the best software engineer in the world, but if they can’t hold a conversation, I’m more inclined to hire a more junior engineer that can."

3. Not thinking strategically.

This advice comes from Refael Zikavashvili, cofounder at Pramp.com. "We recently analyzed over 20,000 interviews conducted on Pramp and the number one mistake software engineers make on their technical Interviews is that they jump into code before thinking through the solution and explaining its correctness to their interviewer. By the time they realize that what they're trying to do is too complicated or doesn't work, they run out of time. To succeed in technical interviews, software engineers must break down the problem first and clearly communicate their approach to solving it prior to proceeding to implementation."

4. Being afraid to say "I don't know."

Parker Phinney, Founder at Interview Cake, says that you don't have to pretend you know it all. "Not saying 'I don't know' [is a mistake]. Your interviewer can tell when you just don't know a piece of trivia ('how are hash collisions handled in Python?'). Great candidates know there'll always be some things they don't know, so they just give a confident, non-apologetic 'I don't know.' (Bonus: throw in a 'but if I had to guess, I'd say X because Y')."

Dan Melnick, whom we met earlier, adds to this in the context of not padding your skills: "One mistake that junior software engineers tend to make is not being completely upfront about their skills. If you’re asked if you have experience in Elastic Search and you don’t, it’s better to say ‘I haven't used that’ than to blow smoke. If you admit to understanding or having experience in something that you’re unfamiliar with and then you get asked to dig deeper, it will only take a few seconds to see that you exaggerated. It’s better to admit what you don’t know - but are eager to learn - than to come off as dishonest."

5. Hiding your human side.

Melnick has one more piece of advice: showing your interviewers a personal side. "Beyond your skills and what's on your resume, companies want to know what makes you tick. Your passion for running or playing drums might seem irrelevant in an interview for a tech position, but these interests can actually teach interviewers a lot about you. The best employees engage in activities outside of work that help them reset in the evenings or on the weekends and come into work energized and ready to perform."

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I am the creator of Learn to Code With Me , where I help people learn how to code so they can get ahead in their careers and ultimately find more fulfillment in their...