During an interview at a company I admire, I was a nervous wreck. This week we started roofing replacing the gutter, sides, and everything in the house. It was loud and distracted me when I was spatially thinking. I spent 45 mins out of my 1 hour designing as I stared at the clock. Then when it went to coding my eyes started to blur and I lost confidence which all began spiraling down from there. Prior to the interview I had just recieved the most cryptic offer letter from another company that was all about “equity in an LLC” and words of being “locked in”, “at will” for 2 years(24 months) for only equity. I was heavily weighing the pros and cons of the offer and wanted to meet up with their team members to see if we could make things work.
Errors
There were so many things I did wrong. I’m not angry I didn’t get the position. I’m more disapointed in myself and the subpar quality.
- What kind of person (with 1-2 years React Experience) messes up non-breaking space and
<input>tags, because I hit spacebar<input> </input>v.s<input></input>. They then told me to use</input>which I should have done in the first place. - I get far too nervious if I see someone’s facial expression change when I work. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have a desktop and only have one screen.
- Why did I not use the page object when designing the mockup? I use it all the time but instead chose a square from the UML diagram.
Went well
- Understood how to build the API after some hints. In my mind I had a good grasp of what the Backend would look like. But it’s a Frontend interview.
Interview Results
As you could have guessed from the intro, I failed. But there’s no excuse when working, even I wouldn’t have accepted that subpar level of quality. In fact, I might have broke off contact thinking that I was lied to. I was thinking along the lines of, “1-2 years experience and you give me this…”. An hour after I had submitted my version, the company posted another article with a link to a page with a splendid design for what they do. I saw it and felt motivated to do better and it was the nail in the coffin at that point. They have better candidates so I know I’m not getting it.
Reflection
What I wanted to showcase wasn’t using html tags, I wanted to showcase my knowledge of React itself. Using stateful/stateless, passing values as props and updating variables are what I did for 1-2 years, not Googling which react library component or html tag should I be using. I just blanked and tunneled extremely hard.
Overcome
- To start off with the basics, I need to calm down and ignore distractions, especially mental ones. Unfortunately, Zoom has no hide video function which makes it my least favorite interview method. I could ask for take-home projects, but most companies don’t have that type of budget and time to review it. I went online and through some randomness, I encountered an article for top 5 apps to use with Zoom. One of them was Circle, which didn’t hide videos but gave the client customization options to crop the image down to a face, and move it anywhere. Its currently publicly released on MacOS so I joined the waitlist for the Windows edition. At first glance, it looks promising because it’s a client side application so the interviewer doesn’t need the software downloaded nor do they know i’m using it.
- Its counter productive to Google things like “How to make an input form, input hidden”. Its a 15 minute MVP so why on earth did I try to do that. What I should have done was just place a form component not an input, had a variable to represent the input display and have a variable for the actual value to pass with submit.
- Better Mockup. A better mockup would have made my component logic much cleaner in code and in my mind. Truth be told, while I did write amazing mockups, I had spent 3x the time designing it than coding it. I think I jumped the gun on mockups too early. Pen and paper is king so I also should have went back to that instead of switching between two tabs on chrome or a side by side view on my small screen. My purpose of using mockups are to share what I had in mind with the team or organize where critical features should go and polish styles.
- Account for time. Relating to a better mockup, I need better time management. When developing mockups I’m too used to the designer lifecycle of continously improving it having an justifiably long amount of time. I need to go back to the wireframe foundations and test by timing myself.
TLDR; Get more experience working under strict conditions.
Thanks for reading
I appologize for the rant-like blog post today. I just needed to get it out of my system.