interviewing.io Blog

I'm not affiliated with them, but it seems like paying for a one time consultation/mock interview through https://interviewing.io/ might help uncover something useful. It does suck that you have to pay to hear the "other side" i.e. a sort of "Honesty as a Service"... Also, for what it's worth, feel free to reach out (email in profile). I haven't interviewed millions of people, but maybe I can help. And it's always more fun to commiserate with someone.

Anxiety is a result of being uncomfortable, which is understandable. Interviews suck, especially the FAANG ones. So - how do you make yourself not uncomfortable? Practice. Make interviewing normal, and it becomes just another thing. I recommend https://interviewing.io/, you can do live practice interviews. After a few, you'll just be comfortable with it. I would also research outcome independence. If you learn to not care whether or not you pass an interview, your comfort level spikes through the roof, and you ultimately improve your odds of passing, oddly enough.

Beyond other advice (e.g. therapist). 1. It's worth keeping in mind that different companies have different kinds of interviews. You might do worse at some but better at others. So one thing you can do is try different kinds. 2. There are places you can _practice_ interviewing, which means you can see how you're doing and learn without the pressure of actually trying to get a job. https://interviewing.io and https://pramp.com. You might get occasional jerk interviewer, but if you treat it as exercise it should be less stressful.

interviewing.io | Sales Manager | SF | ONSITE, FULL-TIME | https://www.interviewing.io interviewing.io helps companies hire great engineers. We provide candidates with free, live, rigorous practice interviews and use data from these interviews to identify top performers, who can then talk to companies anonymously right on our platform. We’ve hired for Facebook, Uber, Twitch, Lyft, Yelp, and more. You’d be the 1st full-time sales person on the team and our 7th overall hire, so in addition to the nice equity upside for being an early employee, there’s tremendous opportunity to make a big impact, not just on the company, but on the direction of the whole hiring industry. So, if you’ve ever wanted to take hiring from a Kafkaesque resume-ridden shit-storm into a rational, delightful process for competent humans, this is your chance! Email [email protected] if interested.

> For mock interviews, definitely check out: > http://interviewing.io/ I got this recommendation about a year ago and tried. The site stated that I couldn't register, but I could sign up for a place in the registration queue. So I did that. I have yet to hear back from them. I don't quite understand how people keep recommending them, as if it was possible to use the site.

On some career advice to keep interviewing even when you aren't looking for a job, I started trying to freshen up my experience. As part of that I did 3 practice interviews with https://interviewing.io/ and they were helpful – the feedback is honest, both about my presentation (e.g., I jumped into coding too quickly), and just stuff to know (e.g., A*). The practice sessions only cover the "whiteboard" part of the interview (not the "tell me about yourself" part). I feel a little bad I haven't followed up and done a practice interview for someone else, but I appreciate the people who helped me out.

I admire triplebyte's effort and the content they produce. Their narrative is really data-driven common sense: some engineers fit to some companies but not to others. Especially enjoyed: http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want I am a programmer and I run http://www.coderfit.com, a tiny recruiting agency in Zurich / Switzerland (reach out to me via e-mail address in my HN-handle if you look for a tech job in Zurich). Recruiting is really, really hard and I am happy to see platforms like http://interviewing.io and http://triplebyte popping up that give programmers without classic CS background a chance.

I was in a similar situation 3 years ago. Like other people said, I'd focus on growth-stage startups (Stripe, Checkr, Airbnb, Opendoor, etc). I found their interviews more practical and approachable than Facebook, Google, etc. Most of the places I interviewed had me writing and running real code on my own computer. I spent about a month prepping with: * Cracking the Coding Interview * https://www.interviewcake.com: curated set of ~50 questions with excellent step-by-step hints that don't immediately spoil the whole problem. Well worth the $250 — I didn't do any Leetcode-style problems aside from these. * https://interviewing.io: Real, anonymous phone screens. This was amazing for me because I hadn't done a technical interview in 4 years and going through a real interview with a real person is totally different than practice problems. Companies in SF will cover your costs to interview and usually will give you a relocation bonus as well, so don't discount moving down here :)

better interviewing through data Quote from http://blog.interviewing.io/ Writing Good Code is like Writing a Novel Quote from https://hackernoon.com/writing-good-code-is-like-writing-a-novel-33973… When I put above two ideas together, I realized following. If you were running a publishing house and needed to a writer to publish your next book, how do you go about picking the writer? You usually look at the body of work from the writer. You read the books the author wrote in the past to decide if the writer is any good. You don't decide if the writer is good or bad from just 1) reading a page of resume and 2) asking him to write out a clever sentence on a whiteboard in the middle of the interview. That tiny slice of data is useless for deciding on anything. If you are all about deciding based on data, why would you make an employment decision based on the most tiny fraction of the actual data (resume and 30 min interview)? Programming/IT/DevOps workers now have ample ways of showing past work. Often it's personal projects in github or a blog with tutorials on how to secure servers. These are far better tools to measure a candidate. Just like reading books by an author is a far better way to predict how that author's works would turn out. And my personal experiences have shown me that majority of interviewers don't read my blog or my github. I find out in interviews that some don't know it's there. It's at the top of my resume for a reason. And no one's asked…

Terrific analysis, thank you! I love reading your posts. I also think that the dynamics differ based on the mode of interviewing viz. Faceless (like http://interviewing.io does) vs face-ful (like normal onsite or video interviews, or the way http://interviewkickstart.com does). I have an observation to share for the latter kind of interviews: When I was hiring at Box for one of my teams (or even now), I'd generally go towards the end, to meet the candidate and talk to them about how the day went. I'd ask them about specific interviews, the interviewers and how they think they did on the given problems. I found that it was surprisingly rare to get a candidate who was aware enough of how things went (positive or otherwise). Digging into it, I realized that the correlation of what the candidate perceived, was simply to how expressive the interviewER was. If the interviewer was friendly and chatty, the candidate would feel like they have done well (or at least forgivably well). If the interviewer was more silent, the candidate would feel they haven't done very well. Now that I do interview training for a living, I try and hammer this point home: that interviews are like a date. It depends a lot on the other person (in this case, the interviewer). Understanding this well often works like magic.

I have not been at a single company that anonymizes its interview pipeline. Are there some examples of companies that do this? I know Interviewing.io does, but they don't have the final say in hires. They just forwarded candidate to companies, which were under no obligation to maintain anonymity. Ironically Interviewing.io's anonymity is why Meta refused to work with them: https://interviewing.io/blog/i-love-meritocracy-but-all-the-recent-ant…

November of 2022 is when the Facebook and Amazon had their big layoffs, and Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce etc. followed in the two months after. I haven't had a recruiter contact me on Linkedin for over a year, in 2022 and before I was being contacted by recruiters on Linkedin all the time. Companies have different modes - mass layoffs, small layoffs, no hires, only hiring replacements, a few new slots open, many slots open. In early-mid 2022 we were in the last category and it's moved to one of the other modes for most companies, except for LLM hires. There are different sources of information, I found this helpful ( https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-predictions-fo… ) from a company with some insights into tech hiring.

From: https://interviewing.io/blog/why-ai-cant-do-hiring#user-content-fn-4 "The future of technical assessments, in the age of generative AI is a noble and difficult topic, though, and it’s something we’ll tackle in a future post." This is exactly what we have built (are now applying to YC as well). Can share more details soon (we are integrating some much needed love on our site), but we are: - FAANG + Startup + Fintech founders - super technical and our expertise is in Product Engineering + ML-for-products - keeping everything 3.5-turbo based free, and probably will have to charge for 4 Our early users (Google/Meta SWEs and a few small AI startups) are pretty shocked with the results they are seeing, which they consider to be "as good if not better than human interviews + feedback". I'll post here next week with a link to try!

This exists, take a look at https://interviewing.io/ replays.

Thanks for the advice! I looked it up, and https://interviewing.io/ is indeed the place. That sounds like exactly the kind of thing I need to gain some confidence. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through as well. I can relate to much of it. The feelings of being trapped are a real thing. I really appreciate the advice, hopefully you’re doing better. FWIW, what you’ve shared has already been a big help in my attitude.

Related from a few months later: https://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-without-fi… Related from 2019: https://blog.interviewing.io/we-ran-the-numbers-and-there-really-is-a-… As far as I can tell from https://blog.interviewing.io/category/diversity/, they haven't done a follow-up with the same thing but more data.

I honestly don't care which company retains the best performers. Is none of my business. Maybe if you are an investor in these companies, might be a useful signal to know such trivia. But from a candidate standpoint, this page is super useful - https://interviewing.io/recordings

Tech recruiter from Switzerland here. YCombinator funds startups, and startups need scale. Hiring is very personal, very hard to automate and scale. Often, tech hiring startups start in a creative way but later become a database of profiles where recruiters can source, similar to Linkedin. Aline Lerner, founder of https://interviewing.io, wrote about this problem here: https://blog.alinelerner.com/ive-been-an-engineer-and-a-recruiter-hiri…

I think mock interviews from a FAANG engineer for free could be a big ask. There is a service that will match you up with a FAANG engineer. It is not inexpensive, as it costs $100 per interview last I checked. Good luck! https://interviewing.io

I’m not sure if they do CV reviews along with interview coaching but https://interviewing.io/ MIGHT be what you’re after?

To the page author: if you adjust the following link (logo) to be the https variant, the site should read as fully secure: http://blog.interviewing.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/just-logo.png Also, maybe add a redirect from http to https?

I stumbled across another amazing resource a while back - recorded mock interviews: https://interviewing.io/recordings/Python-Google-6/ I'm not affiliated with this site, I just thought this was a great idea and well executed. I used to lean toward the "studying algorithms, data structures, whiteboarding, etc. is useless since I'll never actually need them" ideology until later in my career when I realized that worst case (for me) I can take a break from building CRUD apps and refresh my CS fundamentals. I enjoy speeding up code and then asking myself, "can I do better?" each step of the way, trying to make further improvements.

https://www.pramp.com/ (I really like this one and I use it weekly for my preparation) https://interviewing.io/ https://codesignal.com/developers/

https://interviewing.io This is exactly what you are looking for. Good luck. I'm in the same state, got many calls from Google interviewers. I am a little slow in coding hard problems on codeforces. Another couple of months n I shd be good

The ideal process is having one that actually exists. Most startups basically try to wing this without any definition of how they want the interview process to work. IMHO this is about 50% of the problem. On the flip side, large companies appear to be overburdened by process (anecdote example - I've heard from several people that getting into Google takes 6 months on average, along with the notorious b-tree whiteboard process). That being said, I think Aline Lerner[0] and Triplebyte[1] have some good ideas on the topic: [0] - http://blog.interviewing.io/ [1] - https://triplebyte.com/blog I don't think implementing either one of their services is a silver bullet, but are likely n% better than what most companies are doing.

Haven't used them myself, but https://interviewing.io/ seems right up your alley.

I haven't tried it, but I've heard good things about interviewing.io. You do a practice interview with someone for free and they give you feedback. https://interviewing.io/

I don't know you, so don't take this personally, but you should also consider it may not be your tech chops, but some other soft skill that's holding you back... You may want to try some practice interviews like on https://interviewing.io/

> Busniess idea: mock phone/video interviews as a service https://interviewing.io/ exists

Take a look at https://interviewing.io if you're looking to practice interviews. I've used it in the past and it was immensely helpful.