My recruiter gave me the following interview on a tech screen: "Your interviewer highlighted communication as an area that you excelled in and did mention that you made a great impression. The biggest area of concern was the coding - it was described as being unorganized and buggy. Also, debugging was described as being inefficient and time-consuming for small mistakes" I achieved the optimal solution in the end with time to spare. By this feedback, it seems like they wanted the code to be written faster and cleaner on the first attempt? Any other insights I should glean from this? tax: 160k, 3yoe
They might have another problem lined up, sometimes interviewers start with a simpler problem and expect to be solved fairly quickly. Maybe that was the case? To write clean code, with no/less errors, needs practice. Try using an editor with 0 IDE features. Like vim.
Ah, maybe so. They didn’t mention any other problems so I took my time. I’ll be sure to ask next time.
Was this for an L4 role?
Yes
Usually at netflix we don’t care if your code is super optimized and is the best solution. This feedback tells me that or the problem was trivial and you let going in circles or your solution wasn’t as good as you think it was. This can happen if you went straight ahead to coding without thinking too much maybe? Did you kept making changes and running to see how your code behave very often instead of think of what could have happened? There’s a lot of ways you can interpret this feedback, but you are the only one that can do it.
I explained my thought process and solution before I wrote any code. Then wrote it out, with some bugs on the first pass. Then went back, fixed everything and it worked. I looked up the problem and I used the optimal solution.
They also agreed my solution was optimal (when I explained it before I coded).
It sounds like your code style and organization were bad. Optimal solution is sometimes less important than demonstrating knowledge of best practices
That was my thought. But the code didn’t seem long enough to justify that. Solutions online were similar if not the same as what I wrote. Seems like they had an issue with the debugging part which seemed odd to me as I assume most debugging can be all over the place.
Did you write unit tests? Perhaps the interviewer was expecting you to write tests to catch the bugs? Just guessing.
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Weird interpretation. You were given a fair shot for a role. You didn't do as well as others. You were given feedback on areas flagged as both positives and areas of growth. At Netflix, many roles have standardized pipelines, and even for those that don't candidates are easily shared between them...assuming they did well enough to warrant going forward. Many candidates that apply to one role are considered for multiple. When I joined, it was for a different role than I initially applied to. That said, market sucks right now for applicants. It doesn't take much for someone better than you to scoop you on the small number of roles available.