I did 150 technical interviews, 3 lessons learned

I've done a lot of technical interviews. Eventually, I started the senior death where I trained over 250 other software developers helping them pass senior level technical interviews and get hired. In this video, I wanted to share with you the top three non-technical mistakes I see software developers making that ruin their chances of getting hired when doing technical interviews. And the thing is if you make only one of these mistakes, no matter how great you are at React, JavaScript, data structures or whatever, you won't even get a chance to showcase that knowledge.

So, today we are going to talk about things like having the wrong mindset, optimizing the wrong things, and focusing on the wrong side of technical interviews. I will show you what that means in a minute. But first, let's start by understanding what happens when you first start doing technical interviews. Let's say you applied to some jobs with a proper CV and some luck, you get some recruiter calls in.

Then you get your first technical interview, which, if you are like most developers, you will fail. After a few days of biting your nails in frustration and sinking your anger into something like video games, maybe you'd try again. But every time this cycle repeats, you find yourself less and less motivated. Maybe you get to a point where you even want to quit. And I don't mean quit writing code, but say something like, hey, you know, I'll take a month and study more and then maybe do another technical interview.

Or hey, I'll go back to this job and stick in and forget about changing jobs or something better, or find something else to keep you busy, like another video game. In the end, any kind of procrastination is just another way of quitting. And I think that happens because most developers are focused on the end goal when doing technical interviews. In this case, on getting a new job. To make sure you don't end up under a bridge and have money to pay your bills.

Which is why I don't blame them for that. In the end, that's why you are in the job market, that's why you learn how to code. But the problem with this mindset is that it frames everything into a win-lose situation. When you pass an interview, you get closer to winning. But when you fail, you are farther away. And that kind of thinking kind of messes up with your emotions. Because every email, every call, every becomes this life and death situation where you are hanging on that last life signal, which burns you out and of course you end up quitting, because it's too emotionally exhausting.

A better way to frame that is to put your focus on a long-term goal. Let's say in the next 5 years, you want to become a senior engineer or a staff engineer. And the job you want to get now is just the one step towards that greater goal. Because your goal is now a long-term goal, you won't get bothered by the little obstacles on the way. Failing a take home challenge or a technical interview, it's not a catastrophic failure.

It's just learning that will get you closer to your goal. What's actually happening here is that now you are emotionally detached from the outcome. So, you will still get angry from time to time when you fail a technical interview. And if that still happens, I want you to remember this. What is anger? Anger is just energy to solve a problem. And the key is to use that energy productively, not to put it into video games, but keep improving your skills until you win the game.

And a little rule we made up with our mentis, it's every time you get rejected, you go out and you apply to five more jobs. So you channel that energy into something productive. Which brings me to the second lesson of today, optimization. So when you get into this job search mode, you start optimizing things. You know, you tweak your resume, your LinkedIn profile. Then some new shiny object pops up during the interview process, like a new react hook or why not Kubernetes?

And you decide to jump in and just learn that. And while it's okay to iterate and improve. If you change too many things at the same time and you jump around, it's going to be very hard to understand what worked and what didn't. So you even end up more confused. So, my advice here is not to change things too fast. Wait until you have more data. Before changing your resume, just apply to 50 jobs and see how it's doing.

Or before you change your salary expectations in in these recruiter phone calls, just do more calls, do at least 10 calls and see how that goes. Before choosing to invest 60 hours to learn dynamic programming, just Which if you're interviewing out of the fangs, it's not going to be many. I can guarantee you that. And talking about optimization. This brings me to the third mistake and most important change in mindset, if you want to succeed at technical interviews.

So, how the interview process goes? It's you apply to jobs, or you get contacted by a recruiter. You get screening calls, if you pass, you get a take home challenge or live coding interview. Or a system design interview, and finally a culture feed interview and an offer negotiation at the end. I mean, there is variation in this process, depending on the company, but usually that's how it goes. And if you think about it, it's a very linear process.

And as I mentioned, you will most likely not pass your first technical interviews, unless you're some kind of genius programmer, which most of us are not. You know, maybe you get nervous, or just you have a bad day, and it's okay, you're just warming up, you're just getting started. But it's not okay, if that's the only technical interview you had this month, because then you just messed up your only chance to get hired.

Of course you are angry, and of course it's going to bring you down, which means that you need to first get extremely good. At getting technical interviews, before you try to get good at passing technical interviews, because having more companies talking to you will also allow you to relax. During the technical interview process, so you should pay way more attention to your CV and your performance doing recruiter calls.

Before you get the technical interviews, because if you get good at that, you will have more hands to play. You will get good at technical interviews, and you will get one of those software engineering jobs that TikTok is brag about. Or at least a nice job. Finally, if you're interviewing right now, I wish you the best of luck and I will see you in the next one.