My First Tech Interview Felt Like War — This One Question Changed Everything
Picture this: me, sitting in a sterile conference room that smelled like industrial carpet and broken dreams, wearing a suit that made me look like I was cosplaying as a grown up. My palms were so sweaty I could’ve watered a small garden, and my heart was beating so fast I was pretty sure the interviewer could hear it from across the table.
This was it. My first real tech interview at a company whose name I’d been dropping in conversations for weeks, pretending I was way cooler than I actually was. I’d spent the last three months cramming algorithms like I was studying for the SATs all over again, turning my brain into a walking encyclopedia of sorting methods and data structures that I was convinced would make me sound like the next Steve Jobs.
Spoiler alert: I was about to learn that knowing how to reverse a binary tree doesn’t automatically make you employable.
The Battlefield Preparation
Let me paint you a picture of my “preparation phase” and I use that term very loosely. I’d watched approximately 847 YouTube videos with titles like “CRACK ANY CODING INTERVIEW IN 10 MINUTES!” and “This ONE TRICK Will Get You Hired at Google!” (Spoiler: there is no one trick, and those videos are basically clickbait with extra steps.)
I had flashcards. So many flashcards. My apartment looked like a computer science textbook had exploded. Big O notation was taped to my bathroom mirror. I was muttering about hash tables in my sleep. My friends stopped inviting me to hang out because every conversation somehow turned into me explaining why merge sort is more efficient than bubble sort.
The night before the interview, I did what any rational person would do: I stayed up until 3 AM trying to memorize every possible coding question that had ever existed in the history of software development. Because clearly, that’s how you demonstrate your ability to think logically under pressure, right? Right?
D-Day: The Interview That Almost Broke Me
Walking into that office building, I felt like I was entering enemy territory. The lobby had one of those fancy water features that’s supposed to be calming but just made me need to pee. The elevator music was playing some smooth jazz that felt like it was mocking my anxiety. Even the receptionist’s smile seemed to say, “Good luck, you’re gonna need it.”
The interviewer, let’s call him Dave because he looked like a Dave, greeted me with the kind of handshake that probably crushed walnuts for fun. Dave was one of those engineers who wore flip flops to work and had a mechanical keyboard that clicked so aggressively it could probably be heard from space.
“So,” Dave said, settling into his chair with the confidence of someone who’d been through this rodeo about a thousand times, “tell me about yourself.”
Now, I’d prepared for this question. I had a whole speech ready about my passion for problem solving and my love for clean code. What came out instead was something like: “Well, I really like computers, and I think they’re neat, and I built this one project that was pretty cool but then it broke and I never fixed it but I learned a lot from the experience of it being broken?”
Dave nodded like this was totally normal. God bless Dave.
Then came the technical questions. Oh boy, the technical questions.
“Can you explain the difference between a stack and a queue?”
Easy! I’d got this one down cold. I launched into my well rehearsed explanation, complete with hand gestures that I thought made me look sophisticated but probably just made me look like I was directing airplane traffic.
“Great. Now, can you code a solution to find the longest palindromic substring?”
My brain immediately went into full panic mode. I stared at the whiteboard like it had personally offended my entire family. The marker in my hand suddenly weighed about forty pounds. I started writing something that looked like code but was really just a desperate attempt to buy time while my neurons fired randomly like a broken Christmas light.
Fifteen minutes later, I had produced what could generously be called “an attempt.” It was the coding equivalent of abstract art and you could look at it and maybe see something meaningful if you squinted really hard and used your imagination.
Dave looked at my masterpiece with the expression of someone trying to solve a particularly challenging puzzle. “Interesting approach,” he said, which in interview speak translates to “What in the fresh hell is this supposed to be?”
The Question That Changed Everything
By this point, I was pretty sure I’d bombed harder than a comedy show at a funeral. I was already mentally composing my rejection email response and planning my career pivot to professional dog walker.
Then Dave asked the question that completely flipped the script.
“You know what? Forget the algorithm stuff for a second. Tell me about a time you built something – anything – that you were actually excited about. Something that made you stay up late not because you had to, but because you wanted to.”
I blinked. This wasn’t in any of my interview prep materials. There was no “optimal” answer I’d memorized. I couldn’t fall back on technical jargon or textbook definitions.
So I told him about my dumbest project ever.
“Well,” I started, suddenly feeling like I could actually breathe again, “I built this ridiculous app that translates your grocery list into different fantasy languages. Like, you could get your milk and eggs in Elvish or Klingon.”
Dave’s eyebrows went up. “Go on.”
“It was completely useless,” I continued, warming up to the story. “But I spent three weeks on it because I thought it was hilarious. I had to figure out how to scrape translation data, build a decent UI that didn’t look like it was designed by someone with a grudge against eyeballs, and make it actually work on mobile devices.”
“Did anyone use it?”
“My mom downloaded it. She sent me a screenshot of her shopping list in Dothraki. She had no idea what Dothraki was, but she thought it looked fancy.”
Dave started laughing. Actually laughing. Not the polite interview chuckle, but genuine laughter.
“That’s fantastic. What was the biggest challenge?”
And suddenly, I was talking. Really talking. Not reciting memorized answers or trying to sound like someone I wasn’t. I told him about debugging sessions that lasted until sunrise, about the weird edge cases I discovered (apparently, “quinoa” doesn’t translate well into ancient Norse), about the satisfaction of finally getting the API calls to work properly.
I talked about how I’d learned React hooks by accident while trying to manage state, how I’d discovered the joy of writing tests after my app crashed spectacularly during a demo to my friends. I mentioned the Stack Overflow rabbit holes I’d fallen down, the “aha!” moments at 2 AM, the time I accidentally deleted my entire database and had to rebuild everything from scratch.
Dave was nodding along, asking follow up questions that actually made sense. We talked about trade offs I’d made, problems I’d solved, things I’d do differently. It felt less like an interrogation and more like… a conversation. Between two people who genuinely cared about building things.
The Plot Twist
“You know,” Dave said, leaning back in his chair, “your palindrome solution was pretty rough.”
My heart sank. Here it comes, I thought. The polite rejection.
“But the way you just talked about your grocery list app? That showed me more about how you think and solve problems than any whiteboard coding exercise ever could.”
Wait, what?
“Here’s the thing,” Dave continued. “I can teach someone to optimize algorithms. That’s just practice and time. But I can’t teach someone to care about their work, to get excited about solving problems, or to learn from their mistakes. And I definitely can’t teach someone to build something just because they think it’s cool.”
He paused, looking at my disaster of a palindrome solution still scrawled across the whiteboard.
“Besides, half the developers I know would Google the optimal solution anyway. What matters is whether you can think through problems, communicate your ideas, and actually ship something that works.”
The Aftermath and What I Actually Learned
I got the job. Not because I was the most technically brilliant candidate, but because I was human. Because I built things that excited me, learned from my failures, and could talk about my work like it actually mattered to me.
That interview taught me something that no amount of LeetCode grinding ever could: authenticity beats optimization every time.
Sure, technical skills matter. You can’t fake your way through building software. But what matters more is curiosity, resilience, and the ability to communicate about complex problems with actual human beings. Companies don’t just hire code writing machines; they hire people who can collaborate, learn, and contribute to something bigger than themselves.
The funny thing is, once I stopped trying to be the “perfect” candidate and started being myself, interviews got so much easier. I learned to talk about my projects even the silly ones with genuine enthusiasm. I got comfortable saying “I don’t know, but here’s how I’d figure it out.” I stopped pretending to be someone I wasn’t.
Dave became my manager, and later, one of my closest mentors. He taught me that the best engineers aren’t the ones who memorize algorithms; they’re the ones who ask good questions, break down complex problems, and aren’t afraid to admit when they’re learning something new.
The Real Secret Sauce
These days, when friends ask me for interview advice, I tell them to forget about the “perfect” answer and focus on the honest one. Build something weird that makes you excited. Learn from your mistakes. Be curious about problems, not just solutions.
And if you’re ever in an interview that makes you feel like you’re going to war, remember: the best companies want to hire humans, not coding robots. They want people who care about their work, learn from failure, and can explain complex ideas without sounding like they swallowed a computer science textbook.
Your grocery list app in Elvish might be the exact thing that sets you apart from everyone else who can recite sorting algorithms in their sleep.
After all, anyone can reverse a binary tree. But it takes a special kind of person to convince their mom to shop for groceries in Dothraki.
