Why should you go to the interview

Hello everyone, my name is Sergey. At the moment I’m working in Tinkoff Bank, but not so long ago I was the very guy who was looking for his first job. I had a long but fascinating journey. Before I got to Tinkoff, I had over 40 interviews in 15 months. In this article I want to share my experience and try to convince you why should you go to the interviews.

Who is this article for?

This article is suitable for junior developers who is looking for their first job. This experience is also suitable for those who want to improve their soft skills.

I’m writing this article in a development context, but most of what is described in the article will be useful in other areas as well.

Foreword

The story of a friend of mine prompted me to write this article.

I worked for a small company with a team of two developers. I took a course on Android development at Sberbank, where I met one guy. The guy also studied development for Android, but hasn’t worked anywhere yet. Moreover, he didn’t pass no one interview. Moreover, his knowledge was much better than mine.

I asked him a question: “Why don’t you still go to interviews? With this level of knowledge, you would have found a job long ago”. He told me that interviews are stressful, that he feels very uncomfortable there and is afraid to seem stupid.

This is not the only story of this kind. After that, I spoke with many junior developers. I helped several guys study, gave lectures in my company for students. And this happened very often. There were a huge number of people who had sufficient knowledge, but didn’t have the courage to show it and somehow realize themselves.

An interview is an experience

Questions

In junior developer interviews, the questions are fairly similar and test your basic knowledge of the tools you will be working with. There will always be questions to which you don’t know the answer, these are very important questions. They make it clear in which areas you have problems.

During the interview, it is important to immediately write down the questions that you couldn’t answer or gave, but with difficulty. If you don’t write them down right away, then most likely in an hour you will forget most of the questions. After you’ve written out all of these questions, you can come back to them later and study the material that caused you problems. Our brain works very cool here. You may read the material and not remember it at all. But if you screwed up with a question in an interview, and then read about it, then it remains in your brain.

Test tasks

Very often, when interviewing junior developers, they give test tasks. And that’s cool. Most of the tasks are close to real tasks that you have to face in real tasks. Most of the tasks are fairly similar: “Make a network request and display data to the user”. But almost each of them had unique cases. This is a very cool experience, you can spend several free evenings on a task and at the same time learn a lot more than if you came up with tasks yourself.

There are quite a few companies that leave feedback and this is extremely valuable. I had interviews in which the interviewer gave feedback on each question. If I couldn’t answer the question correctly, he immediately gave me the correct answer with explanations. Sometimes, after a test task, I received a rejection, but the answer also contained links or topics that I should better familiarize myself with.

Ability to communicate

In interviews, you learn to communicate with strangers. Learn to feel calmer and more confident. Over time, I completely got rid of the stress of interviews and even began to enjoy the process.

I remember my first job interview. It was terrible. I was terribly nervous and couldn’t answer even those questions to which I knew the answer perfectly. But after a dozen interviews, I began to feel much calmer and more confident. I was able to work through many template questions. I drew conclusions on how best to answer non-technical questions: “What salary do you expect?”, “Who do you see yourself in 5 years?” etc. Believe me, such questions are often confusing when you hear them for the first time.

I have learned to ask interviewers myself, and this is no less important than the ability to answer questions. Because you are judged not only by technical characteristics. You aren’t a machine in which it is only important how it performs its duties, you are a person with whom interviewers may have to work and communicate. And if you just sit and are afraid to say a word, it will not leave a good impression on you.

Motivation

I often tell my friends who are just starting their careers to start going to interviews as early as possible. And just as often I hear answers like this: “I’m not ready yet, I’d better work out another six months and then I’ll start”.

Of course, you can wait half a year or even a year, but even then it will not be a guarantee that you will pass immediately. In addition to technical knowledge, you still always have the item “Communication skills”. So how do you know you’re ready if you don’t try? Unfortunately, many of people don’t understand this obvious fact.

It may seem to you that you don’t know anything, that everyone around you knows much more than you, but this has little to do with reality. You will be interviewed by different people, each with their own views on a good candidate. You can simply be liked by someone as a person and the interviewee will simply believe in you. Anything can happen. Because with a 1 in 100 chance, you are way ahead of those who don’t go at all. You can wait another half a year to be sure. Then at another job for 2–3 years to go to the company of your dreams (suddenly they will refuse earlier). Then another 10 years to open the startup of your dreams.

You should also understand that no one cares about you. And this is good. No matter how silly you look at the interview, believe me, the person you are interviewing has most likely seen even more stupid situations. Yes, he can remember himself in your place. Nobody is going to laugh at you, and what does it matter in general if you don’t know something, even if it is very simple for most.

There are those who say that rejection demotivates them. Yes, this is sometimes unpleasant, but this is also a matter of habit. You can be an overcool specialist and sit at home and no one will ever know about you, or you can be an average person and shout to the whole world that you are and sooner or later someone will notice you. Will they refuse? Yes, probably. There are those who were lucky from the 1st or 2nd time, but there are other stories, I needed to go through about 25 interviews before the first offer. The question is what will you lose. You can go to an interview and get a refusal, and the only thing that you will lose is a few hours of your time and return to the same place where you were, and if you are lucky you will receive the job offer you dreamed of.

A few final tips

Never try to come up with an answer to a question you don’t know the answer to. It’s okay not to know something, especially if you’ve never worked with this technology. When a person says that he doesn’t know something, it means that the person understands his knowledge gap and is ready to fill it if necessary. Otherwise, you will show an unwillingness to admit that you don’t know something. The interviewer will understand this anyway, and you will also look very stupid.

At interviews, recruiters sometimes may not behave very adequately, ask questions that have nothing to do with work and to which one would like to answer: “None of your business”, only more rudely. In general, it can be different. Don’t be rude to them in response or behave the same way. It can be annoying and unpleasant, but it’s not worth it. The IT world is rather small, and people tend to communicate with each other. You will definitely not win anything, but someday you may lose because of this.

Learn to ask questions. How will the workflow go? What conditions? Who will you have to work with? Is there a code review and how it works. Ideally, prepare a list of questions about anything that interests you. So you will be viewed as a person who really wants to work in this company, and not “Just to get hired,” even if this is true.

Before the interview, it is advisable to spend 20 minutes of your time and read about what the company does. This is a fairly common question. By the way, at one interview I just forgot to read about where I was going and when I was asked, there was nothing to answer. The recruiter asked: “What does it matter, just to get hired?” We smiled and still sent me a job offer, but another recruiter may refuse because of this.

In the end

Now I also go to interviews, only this time as an interviewer. And everything described above really works. I saw guys who didn’t pass the selection because they weren’t sure of themselves, but had objectively more knowledge than the candidate who received the offer. I saw guys who fell on simple questions simply because they were terribly nervous.

Your task is to come for an interview and not just show that you know how to fulfill your duties, but that you are the person who will come and start solving the company’s problems. That you are a person who is not afraid to make mistakes. That you are a person who is ready to learn and move forward.

And may the force be with you.