The Software Developer's Career Handbook

Chapter 5. The Nerves

There’s a collection of emotions competing in your head before an interview, and no matter how many interviews you go through, some version of them will always show up. I think they can be collectively viewed as the Nerves.

The Nerves are the jumble of every single emotion and question bouncing around your head trying to get out. Questions like:

• Who am I going to meet?

• Are they going to ask me to code?

• Can I accurately communicate how cool the stuff is that I build?

• Is my love of this potential new job going to come off as desperation?

My opinion is that the biggest source of the Nerves is judgment. In the next six hours, your career is literally on trial. You are about to be cross-examined by a handful of strangers regarding your education and your experience. The result of this cross-examination will be a decision regarding your future livelihood.

An interview is a crucible where everything you’ve learned and everything you’ve done is being measured and understood in a day, and it’s your responsibility to elegantly and eloquently describe this experience to a bunch of strangers.

I understand why you are nervous.

In this chapter, I’m going to give you a simple strategy for handling the hardest part of the interview: answering questions.

Question Types

First, let’s understand the questions that are going to show up. There are three classes of questions you’re going to encounter:

Specific

These questions are focused. How’d you end up at that company? ...