Comment by Siddharth Vishvanath (Sid) on "How do you prepare for job interviews?"

I did these when I was searching for a job. It was a painful journey of rejections. But I finally got it.

For interviews I would first start practicing HR interview questions. Then when I get comfortable about answering those questions I move to participating in coding competitions.

Then I set up a mock interview in a website called Pramp. It's really good for people who want to practice coding for interviews and the questions are really good.

In Pramp you have to attend 5 mock interviews then after that, a person from Pramp will contact you.They will help you to search for a job. It's really helpful.

At this stage you should actually be very efficient at coding in any language of preference. Next you need is interview calls. For that you would need to change your resume to see which gets a better response. You need to play trial and error game for some time until you get a good response from all types of companies big and small.

So I recommend you first finish setting up the resume then move on to the next step. These were the very few of my experiences preparing for interviews.

Just Keep you head up always because in the journey to get a job you will face a lot of rejections.

Pramp looks really valuable and is free. Thanks for the tip. Do you see companies doing whiteboard style interviews these days? I think practicing whiteboard mock interviews is helpful. Not sure if that would work on Pramp.

Yeah I have not faced a whiteboard interview yet so I don't have a idea about what happens in that. But the book by gayle laakmann on interviews is my guide to know what goes on in an interview. Mainly I have read that you will be asked a question to solve on a whiteboard. You have no syntax highlighting or eslint. Your mind and eyes are the linters and syntax highlighter. The way I would practice it is through pen and paper. If you have friends or family member who are willing to help you they can read out the question just for the experience. Then they set of a timer based on the toughness of the question maybe 20 mins. You write the code on paper and record yourself explaining what you are doing again for practice. Then write the exact code that you wrote on paper in a editor. If it runs successfully with all test cases then good job you passed the whiteboard interview. Even to mock a HR interview I asked my friend to ask a list of questions that I had written on a paper and I recorded the session. After the session I played the audio and saw whether I would hire myself.

Have you done anything like this before?

Yes. That book sounds useful! I've found the book "Cracking the Coding Interview" helpful. I've been interviewed probably 40 times... so painful. I've interviewed others 100 - 150 times. These numbers are over 20 years. I have done volunteer mock interviews to help others prepare for whiteboard interviews. I'm just curious how people think about these issues in 2019.

What do you think about Application Tracking Systems in companies ? Does it really help in getting a good candidate ? Have you filtered out resumes using this before ?

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