I spent the last 3 to 4 months job searching on top of all of my other responsibilities such as school, family and even squeezing in a few of my hobbies from time to time. Since I had a previous career as a project manager I’ve had a lot of experience preparing and interviewing for that field and I have been surprised at how different the process feels for CS jobs.

The biggest difference is the technical portion of interviews for CS positions. There are “technical” questions in project management interviews, but they can all mostly be explained with a few PM strategies and soft skills. It would be a full-day process to really dive into an example project and convey how you would tackle a project and most companies (and interviewers) won’t commit that much time for an interview.

Developer interviews will have a technical portion that can showcase a person’s skills or lack thereof. Whether a code walkthrough or an actual coding problem. I’ve found myself preparing for the technical portions of interviews to the exclusion of soft skills/culture fit, mostly because I am very confident in those pieces of interviews. I both really enjoy and am very frustrated with these technical tests. I enjoy them because it does highlight my skills and the preparation has undoubtedly made me a better programmer. But I am extremely frustrated with them as well because software development/CS is such a large field that it is impossible to be prepared for all possible questions. Multiple times I have been stumped by questions in interviews that I had no idea about, or it was something that I had learned six months to a year before and subsequently forgotten the details of. Speaking with other students, developers and professionals I know that I am not the only one frustrated with the process and that there is a general consensus that technical interviews are an unwanted, but necessary part of the interview for most companies.

I’ve accepted a job offer, but the frustration of interviewing lingers with me because I know that there is a better way to conduct them, but I don’t know what it is.