HACKER Q&A
📣 freewilly1040

Experience with Interview Coaches?


I'm curious if anyone has had a good experience with a coach / some kind of service to improve your interviewing. Possibly this include a bit on coding screens, but I'd be more curious if there's anything out there that can improve more discussion based interviews (ie architecture, past experience).


  👤 austincheney Accepted Answer ✓
Architecture is best understood from experience making architectural decisions. That being said this is immediately a danger moment during an interview.

Many developers, including those conducting interviews, have not taken the time to learn architecture by going through the rigorous numerous failures to flesh an idea out into a simplistic data structure that scales with a primitive API and is independently reusable. These things seem obvious once completed but take practice and vision to formulate, and of course several rounds of refactoring. When you are interviewing for an architect position it’s that vision that you want to look for, but many interviewers are clearly looking for patterns (code and/or behaviors) they are already familiar with.

My guidance is if you have some experience with architecture be original, right or wrong, but indicate that you are flexible and respond well to criticism. If you are not confident enough to be original be very clear about that without hesitation.

This guidance way result in disqualification from an interview, but that is probably a good thing unless you are financially insecure and just need any job. Reasons this could disqualify a candidate is employer fear of internal original code and fear of challenges to an insecure interviewers credibility or authority.