Acceptable mistakes in an interview
Recently I went to a Microsoft interview event. It had 4 rounds. I think I did well in terms of asking clarifying questions, coming up with an optimal algorithm, talked through my approach and time complexity and when interviewer looked convinced, I started coding. After the coding, I did some dry run on few test cases either created by me or given by interviewer. I found few edge cases were failing and corrected those. I made few mistakes like missing an if condition, and forgot to return my answer in one question. My gut feeling after the interview was that it went well but now I think I would be rejected because I was not perfect. Wanted to learn what are the acceptable mistakes in an interview? Is taking hints bad in an interview? In other words if an interviewer points out a bug in code, does it mean straight reject? TC: 130
Sound like forgivable mistakes to me. If you’re rejected for something like this then you don’t want to work for this company.
Alot of times interviewers may sneakily have more than one question. If you spend the whole time on that question and even close to perfect, you missed the next one. Try asking upfront how many questions they have so you can time and blast code on the white board accordingly. It's truly bullshit but I dont think its changing anytime soon.
I checked with other candidates, and it looked like they asked only one question. But I may be wrong.
If you found the mistakes in your code while testing that is something that can be OK, however the fact that you had only 4 interviewers may not be in your favor. There usually is a 5th interview with the hiring manager tacked on the end if you performed well.
In an interview event, they only had 4 interview rounds. This was stated before the interview also.
Unless it is a hiring event. They typically send the candidate a smaller schedule with only 3 interviews (while they get 5 interviewers for 5 rounds). They ask the candidate to block the entire day for interviews though. If things go well, they ask the candidate to do 2 more, otherwise, they end the loop without having to waste time. Also, the interviewers talk to each other between interviews which might lead them to be biased before they even meet the candidate. They use that to fine tune the areas each interviewer focus on based on what the candidate demonstrated in the previous rounds.
There are different levels of mistakes. Lower the level, the better. 0. Bug free code 1. Bug spotted fixed after hint 2. Bug spotted fixed after pointing test case 3. Bug fixed after pointing Bug. 4. Unable to fix bug.
What if interviewer didn't point out the bug? I missed a repeated if statement that I realised later. Although for a similar situation I had handelled it before in the code .
Op, did you hear back?
Yes. Its a reject. Much to my surprise it's a reject in all 4 rounds. I am still trying to figure out what went wrong.
Sorry to hear that. How do you know it’s a reject from all 4? Afaik recruiters don’t go into specifics like these.
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