Time for some interviews
The interviews started, but still not the real one yet.
I had two interviews this week, both to make us feel more comfortable and show what we have learned during the academy, the last phase and notice what we have to improve.
The first interview made me very nervous because I had to try to explain many concepts and it’s something I’m not very good at, mainly because the very idea of being “evaluated” makes that the word I say makes no sense… at least that happened with the first interview. In the second interview I was more relaxed and was able to give good answers with my ideas being better organized, but in the end it wasn’t the best interview because I realized something in my first interview and couldn’t fix it for the second one and that was that I lose the context easily; the interview it’s structured so that the topics are related to each other, but I can’t avoid going into another topic when I shouldn’t, also another thing I realized in my second interview was that I don’t finish my answers in a good way and end up getting awkward. Some of the feedback from my second interview and that is from another ex-academy is that I’m allowed to ask some questions too, not like reversing roles but in a way where if you don’t know the answer you can ask to them to give you a tip or explain it, I’ll try it next time.
Actually, before the interview for the academy I watched the video “Example Code/Engineering interview” from Google, that shows a mock interview solving a problem. At the beginning it was a bit weird because it was the first time I watched a Coding Interview and didn’t know what to expect. To be honest, I thought that asking so many questions could show that one doesn’t have all the knowledge for the position but what I have learned from the academy is that asking questions actually shows that you have interest and are curious about the topic and because we’re going to work with other teams that means being able to learn other approaches. Also there is this other video about Competitive Programmers with Clement ft. Errichto. I have watched those Programmers because I like the advice from Clement and Errichto’s skills to solve problems. From Clement I learned some etiquettes for Tech screens interviews, especially because I didn’t know what to do during the interview or if I needed to be more formal or more casual.
Lastly, I want to talk about my experience in my interviews. First I felt like I know about the topics but I wasn’t able to explain it in a better way, thankfully, being able to speak it out loud helped me to notice where I was wrong or what I need to improve, thanks to that I think I did better in the second interview and also made me feel more comfortable. There are still some topics I need to study like Interfaces, I’ve read about it but in Python there is not need to use interfaces so it’s kind of hard to fully understand, because of that I decided to learn a little more about Java and ask some other academy that have Java as their first language to explain it to me. Also I have to study more practical cases to serve as a base to explain my ideas better because this was the same feedback I got from both the interview and from my mentor, who said that being able to give an example about one concept shows that you have enough knowledge about the topic, something that totally makes sense.
