Lessons learned from blowing an interview

I think you reacted as many of us do... being nervous, hyper self-conscious, second-guessing your instincts, and not getting anywhere near the 'zone' or 'flow' you normally operate in. I think this is normal...and doesn't really reflect one-way or another on your ability to do the day-to-day work in a calm atmosphere.... which is why IMHO the results of your coding session aren't particularly useful in evaluating you as a candidate.

I was so nervous but coding relaxed me, so It when well in the end, I believe I had help from above.

Yup. About a zillion trillion times until I learned how to push my mind through it. It's just another kind of performance, and it requires training and psyching-up for, like any other.

What's crazy is, after the call was over, I went back to work, opened up a text editor, and wrote functioning code in less than 10 minutes. It was 12 lines of code. 12 lines of code cost me a job.

This happens all the time, unfortunately. The people constructing these "tests" simply neglect to consider the level of anxiety many candidates have to deal with (not to mention the distractions that aren't even related to anxiety or insecurity -- like just the discomfort that comes from being watched, and having to explain, in real time, thought processes that you're used to experiencing as completely private -- and on no particular deadline).

It's also not too different from real-life coding. When under pressure (or just needing a break), my first approach to a moderately difficult (or even fairly trivial) coding task might be pure crap. Then, after the coffee break (or just letting the problem gestate without thinking directly about), a much simpler and more intuitive solution emerges -- almost like magic.

Of course, the fun part is we don't get that second "after the coffee break" try in coding interviews. What happens instead is that some guy (who at the end of the day, might be just as well qualified as you are -- but at different things at the moment) thinks you're an idiot for not immediately solving some problem the pulled from some book or website. Then goes and gets himself another $6 latte (while you go back to either unemployment or your dead-end job).

How did you recover?

Experience. Having enough sufficiently cool/rewarding job (and non-job) experiences to get a visceral, internal assurance that other people's assessments of you just don't matter is really the hugest and most fundamental part.

And then after that, just do all the background reading on "interview-ology" (including all the coding challenges, the brain teasers, the inane HR and culture fit questions). Then like the saying goes, "Get up in the morning. Fail. Go home. Do it all over again." Just keep going to as many interviews as you can (without burning any bridges) until you get the hang of it -- which eventually you will.

This is also the exact reason why we stopped doing this with people, it just isn't reflective of if they are good or not. Instead we ask you to psuedo code something and just walk us through it as you do it. In fact we prefer to do it as a team, so we suggest something and hopefully you take it from there, or correct us or give us your ideas etc. It also helps us see if you fit in the team too, and honestly it helps people relax.

And hey, I would laughed if I heard a candidate say oh shit. that's good stuff, and shows you are human like the rest of us. Frankly, I wouldn't be worried about blowing that interview, you'll find someplace where you'll fit and do well.

They want someone to do well in the interview, so while some interviewers wouldn't talk to you more, I wonder if some might jump right back into the conversation. Any thoughts on how they might have responded to this? Did you consider calling them right back?

After the interview, I started beating myself up over the dumb things I said. But after a few hours, I opened up Photoshop, mocked up a better solution and sent it over to the recruiter (who I then asked to forward my solution to my interviewer).

I progressed to the next round.

I honestly don't know if my revised solution helped or not, but I'm sure it didn't hurt.

It's also worth remembering that interviewing well is a skill that most of us don't get a lot of practice at. The stress and unusual circumstances make simple tasks harder than normal. Next time try to find out in advance how the company you're interviewing with conducts their tests and try to simulate it yourself in advance. Do they use a particular screen sharing app? A different IDE? A whiteboard? Being more familiar with the situation can help you focus on the task at hand instead of being distracted by the circumstances.

Very human situation -- turns out that interviews and auditioning aren't always the ideal environment to evaluate talent. There's still time to salvage the situation.

Send the hiring executive a note today-- be candid "I totally choked, would you be amenable to a do-over? I'd like to show you that I really know my stuff."

Personal disclosure, learning, and good humor are desirable team member qualities. The worst they can do is say no.

When you're in an interview, you lose the ability to hold a lot of things in your working memory. So you really have to rely on your intuition, at least until you learn to relax.

I've been looking for a full time webdev job for a long time without any luck. I've been asked simple questions and failed them miserably. Failed to write a line of code similar to what I do on a daily basis ("did you actually done our online tests yourself?"), failed to answer on a question about a simple term that I knew (mostly because I read books and docs in original English, while being asked them in my native), failed to answer what projects I've worked on (because I forgot about them all at once), failed by looking for complexity in some trivial questions.

So yeah, the anxiety is strong in me. Meanwhile, I do freelance work part-time at night, making web apps for few clients, while working full-time on an unrelevant low wage job, fearing to lose it because I have to support my wife and 2yo.