Interview season is in full swing. I currently have 8 interviews scheduled for the first two weeks in February, with 6 more pending to be scheduled. The experience has been a whirlwind.
In my previous career in clinical trials you could usually expect to do just 1 interview. Particularly discerning companies might ask you to attend a second meeting with senior leadership if you already got the go-ahead after the first interview. For new-grad Software Engineer positions, the normal process seems to require 5-6 interviews/assessment, totaling as many hours.
Anyone who is going through the New Grad job-finding process probably already knows this, but here is how it has typically broken down for me:
- OA (Online Assessment) — 1-2 hours
- Phone Screen — 1 hour
- “On Site” round — 3-4 hours
- 1 behavioral (aka “team fit”) interview – 1 hour
- 2-3 technical coding interviews – 1 hour each
Most interviewers that I have had so far has been engaging, professional, and kind. Despite this, the process has been kind of grueling so far. I think this stems mostly from how hard it seems to know how well the interview process is going with any particular company. I’ve gotten rejections at the OA stage despite giving Big-O optimal solutions with time to spare. On the other hand, I’ve gotten to the final rounds for some companies despite the Phone Screen interviewer watching me sweat while barely scraping together a working solution.
It’s easy to waffle back and forth between feeling like I’m in over my head, to feeling like I must be doing something right since I keep being moved forward in the process. It can’t just be a fluke if it keeps happening, right? Maybe I’ve simply been a CS student for long enough now that the ambiguity and variability of the output despite the input now feels odd. I’d be more comfortable if formal logic could be applied to this process.
Alas.
