It has been a month so far.
What I've learned so far?
Don't put several interviews on the same day.
It's hard to track information as you are speaking with the interviewers. There is no room to think about the company and what your steps are ahead.
These interviews are long processes that are not paid
Don't accept "deadlines" you are not in a contract, you are not at work, they will not pay you this, no matter if this goes right or wrong.
Value your time, and don't put several challenges for the same week.
If they don't like that, that is their problem, you don't have to please them, they are not even paying you for this. If the company is really urged, they have to pay you for your time or simplify their process.
Maintain your mental health above all.
It is pretty easy to get demoralized after several failures.
After three weeks, I felt a complete and utter failure.
I started to spiral in anxiety, so I decided to do a complete stop.
Ask about how they manage the payment.
This will make more sense to people from Latin America. If you receive your payment in crypto, use an intermediary company like Bitwage, or have a foreign account, ask the interviewer if they will pay in any of those methods.
Don't spend time doing a challenge for a company that will flat-out refuse to pay you in your terms.
I was doing a screening for an Uruguayan company. They insisted that they were going to open an Uruguayan bank account for me.
Although I mentioned that I already have my preferred method, they simply ignored this.
There is no silver bullet.
It is a general recommendation that you have some sort of knowledge of a company before the interview.
I notably spent several hours researching what Storj was and what they offered.
As the end result, I didn't even reach the technical exam. I was screened out.
It is not a conclusive result, but this was pointless researching overall what did the company do. They had several solutions. I didn't have a clear vision of what I was going for, just that I had a company that offered several things and zero ideas on what to ask.
This experiment is the result of 1/33 companies. I've spent several hours researching.
The point is that the consumed time doing that took time out of doing technical preparation.
Ask how much time the feedback will take
The Spanish company started with an aggressive deadline of 1 week to complete (take into account that I do this challenge, I can't do others or interview other companies).
The code wasn't a lame CRUD. It had a level of complexity and research.
At 3 weeks now, the feedback is that "they liked it, is well organized and documented.", but still, I've got another technical challenge ahead.
The amount of time I dedicated to that really crippled me hard with other challenges I had, and then I didn't receive an answer for 3 weeks.
That is not good for me as an interviewed person.
If I don't have precise timing when the feedback is provided, I'm kicking those interviews for later weeks.
It is counter-productive to demand a deadline and then don't know when you are receiving feedback.
Embrace it. Companies will not tell you what went wrong
My test case is the company Polar. I've reached their fast process to the last instance.
I deduct that I did not pass the test because, after almost a month with no feedback, that means that I'm not their right person.
I sent an email a week after asking how it went, and I've never heard back from them.
Out of 33 companies, only "three" provided feedback about the process.
I use quotes because, technically, two of these were staff augmentation companies.
After resolving their interview, it didn't do anything for me because there is another phase where I will have another different and drastically different challenge.
If you have feedback, it may mean nothing.
> Jorge wanted to let you know that I'm moving forward with another candidate and don't think we are a good match. I enjoyed our time talking and working through some code. I think you have a bright future ahead and wish you the best.
That is the only verbose output I had from a process.
Does it tell me how to improve?.
No.
Does it mentions what went wrong?.
No.
I don't know what a good match is. This was like when I was getting rejected by girls when I was inviting them out.
I'm not complaining about the interviewer. That is absolutely not the point.
At least I had a quick rejection notice, which is more than what other companies have done, but it is still nothing.
It is hard to read between the lines what they are looking for.
Some tech interviews are a blatant copy of the Cracking the code interview with runtime questions, such as run time complexity of a palindrome solution that I quickly created.
Others are subtle, like create a translator from decimal to English numeral or roman numeral and going over the code.
Some of them ask you questions like a robot and recall absolutely all the functions in the language you are evaluating. I tend to avoid wasting time on this.
If they don't read a manual, I'm not memorizing all the programming languages I know and recall every single function call.
Be calm
Don't act irrationally, take your time, study ahead of time, prepare challenges in hacker-rank or other tools.
Read cracking the code interview.
Don't feel bad. Even if you do all of these things, it most likely will go wrong.
You are not a bad developer. You've spent time doing this.
I decided to do a complete stop and start refactoring how I do challenges and how many.
At most, I'm thinking of doing a challenge per week.
It had a crippling effect to receive so many rejections in three weeks.
I'm starting to filter staff augmentation companies. These are sponges that add another technical barrier ahead of me.
I'll update this and mention how it went.
I started already to space out challenges. It may go wrong. Still, I'm trying this out, but the most essential part is that I want to have peace of mind and don't feel pressured by things that will never be paid.
And finally, an update on the stats.
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