Q: What has your job (or internship) interview process been like? What surprises you? What frustrates you? What excites you? How did you prepare? How did you perform?
What is your overall impression of the general interview process? Is it efficient? Is it effective? Is it humane? Is it ethical?
A: A lot of what I’ve done for my entire life so far has been analyzing and understanding what I needed to do to achieve greater accomplishments. So when society tells me that education is the way, that the eventual SAT is the way, and that going to a great college will eventually lead to a great job is the way, I did everything I could to get there. I sacrificed a lot to study for the SAT, I spent a lot on college applications, and I hope I’m doing everything I can in college right now.
But now what I’m considering is whether what I’ve had to do has been worth anything, because I’m not even sure that those tests have to do with me testing whether I’m worth anything in any way. If something is so down to a science in many textbooks, preparatory materials, and etc, then it almost feels as though I’m just a regurgitating monkey, just spitting out answers I’ve seen over and over again. I’m not even sure that those major milestones were due to any of my achievements, but due to a system that’s so biased in the first place, that even though I may be going through the ropes, who knows whether I’ll succeed in my own right. So now that I’m going through studying the preparatory material again, this time, for technical interviews, I can’t help but feel as though the job interview process is so familiar to all those other major milestones, and can’t help but wonder whether the end result of being able to support my family with getting a quality job will all be left to chance or randomness in difficulty or even a simple dislike of just looking at me.
After going through I think maybe around 50 interviews since freshman year, I think that interviews are really chance. It depends on the rapport between the interviewer and me, it depends whether it’s not a random puzzle or a data structure that was covered very briefly, or it’s something so complicated that it intimidates me right off the bat. I can’t trust my gut feeling either. There have been times where I felt as though I’ve had the best interview in my life, but I’ve ultimately just been rejected or never contacted again.
There’s the screening process as well, where there have been times where if I missed a single question or case, I would be flat out rejected. There have also been times where the process came down to an interviewer being cranky, obviously tired, or didn’t even understand the language that I was using. And worst of all, there have been times where I had to do most of the rapport, and all I got as a reply were “uh huh” and “sure”.
The interview process right now is extremely hard. Even getting entry or a chance to interview is tough, the amount of ridiculous problem solving and regurgitating of algorithms that one doesn’t need to do interview-wise makes it tougher. And even if you get the questions right, the fact that its left to a coin flip as to how some people are feeling that day is the thing that makes this process just topple on itself.
I may or may not be being too negative right now, but I think that I’m justified in my negativity because of how the process is due to so many circumstances that it feels like it’s out of my control. At least I hope networking seems like the surefire way to at least get a foot in the door.