Review of My Job-Change Interviews at 5 Companies as a 3rd-Year Backend Developer (Including Rejections)
I applied to 5 companies, passed the document screening at 4, and received one final offer. I'll write mainly about my preparation process and the questions I was asked.
The coding tests were all similar; the difference was in the technical interviews. At one company, they asked only CS questions for 40 minutes. At another, they relentlessly dug into my experience handling incidents in a project I had worked on. The latter was much harder, but I also learned a lot from it.
If the interviewer keeps asking, "Why did you do it that way?", memorized answers get exposed immediately. Organizing the things I had actually experienced was the most efficient approach.
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Agreed—coding tests are similar everywhere, so they don’t seem to really differentiate candidates.
If you got 1 offer out of 5 interviews, honestly, isn’t that just average? Am I the only one who feels like it comes across as a bragging post? lol
I can relate. I also got eliminated fast because I came off as having memorized my answer to "Why did you do it that way?" After that, I started writing down the reason behind every decision for each project, one line at a time. That really helped.
Do you have a source? Or is it purely your own experience?
Are there still places that ask only CS questions for 40 minutes? These days it's mostly just assignment reviews or system design—isn't that old news?
Interviewers who really dig into your incident-response experience are scary as hell lol. I lost my composure at “Where did you check the logs back then?” I ended up failing that interview, but since then I’ve been consistently keeping an incident log.
Oh, I didn't know that.