There’s quite a bit you can do to knock a technical interview out of the park. In fact, the first 10 minutes are the most important as you set direction, ideas and a foundation of your answer in place.

I’ve read through thousands of pieces of feedback from engineers at Facebook, Apple, startups and top quantitative trading firms and have personally hired 100+ engineers in search of answering this: “How can more people crush the interview?”

The good news is it’s not magic. It’s process and approach.

These are the top 5 tips I give candidates today:

1. For everyones sake, THINK OUT LOUD. Let me explain. The #1 reason engineers don’t crush the interview is because they lack the ability to explain and showcase HOW they came to a solution. I can’t stress this one enough and it’s mind blowing how many times people fail interviews for this exact reason. This is SO, SO obvious at the beginning of an interview whether someone will or won’t do this. Like all those Nike shirts out there, JUST DO IT.
2. Gather requirements and ask clarifying questions. Always, always, always do this. You need to identify the scope of the problem you’re about to take on and you can instantly understand more about which direction to take your answer if you have more data points. For example: Is this rolling out to a set # of users or the entire community? (aka, understand scale). Ask questions about latency, storage, how data will funnel through the system, key goals of this service, define API’s you’ll use (if needed) etc.
3. Logic + Simplicity + No Bullshit is your winning formula. The easier you make it to understand what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, why you’re doing it and the more simple the solution, you’ve just wow’ed the socks off the interviewer. If you use some sort of knowledge that simply isn’t feasible as a basis of your answer, you’ll instantly lose credibility.
4. Use Defensive Coding (when applicable). Production ready, error free code is the holy grail in many technical interviews. Are you considering outliers, using the simplest approach, optimizing for key variables etc.
5. Expertly handle constraints, bottlenecks etc. and you’ll be well on your way to crushing an interview. What’s even better is you anticipate what these might be and call them out on the front end of your solution that you’re thinking about them and have a solution in mind in case they come up.

Naturally, I can advise you to do more prep or focus on more pieces of the interview but in all likelihood, one can not be great at all things. If you focus on an approach like the one outlined above, you’ll already be doing better than most of your peers and if you actually know your stuff, you’re well on your way to nailing the interview.

Feel free to message me for personalized tips depending on the type of interview, company etc.