CSCareerQuestions

1047 readers

47 users here now

A community to ask questions about the tech industry!

Rules/Guidelines

Follow the programming.dev site rules
Please only post questions here, not articles to avoid the discussion being about the article instead of the question

Related Communities

[email protected] - a general programming community
[email protected] - general question community
[email protected] - for questions targeted towards experienced developers

Credits

Icon base by Skoll under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

just bombed an interview (self.cs_career_questions)

submitted 8 hours ago by pugsnroses77 to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

applied internally to a role thatd be a nice pay pump. its a data role with a strong emphasis on python and sql skills. i studied my ass off on data concepts anticipating questions like "how would you start solving xyz problem" or "how would you find business insights on zyx" and the first question is "whats the difference between a dict and a list in python?" or hell, even a leetcode-like question. i like to think im decent at USING python and sql, but not having used them in a current role in ~2 years, these google-search-esque questions threw me off guard. i fumbled making up answers for a few but some i straight up had to say i have no fkn clue. so todays been a bit of a demeaning experience! has anyone else ever had an interview where they asked questions like that?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] pugsnroses77 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

this is very kind, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 59 minutes ago

Aha, something I didn't mention it my sibling post about interviewing for DreamJob™: once I was on the team and on the other end of the interviews, the theme from my manager was always to see how the candidate thinks and solves problems. He always stressed that they don't know our tools and processes. It was less about getting the right answer and more about demonstrating that they'd have the ability to do the job once we onboarded them.

There was a guy who I congratulated on his first day joining our department who was surprised. He told me he thought I disliked him in the interview (I actually wrote him a solid post-interview review, he was great). That was back when I thought it was a good strategy to be stone-faced in interviews and before I got enough wisdom to just be casual and approachable. Maybe you interviewed with a dickhead like the old me who didn't know any better yet!