Hacker Bits, April 2016

About 50% of the Triplebyte candidates
who fail interviews at companies
fail for non-technical reasons.
1. Be enthusiastic
Enthusiasm has a huge impact
on interview results. About 50%
of the Triplebyte candidates
who fail interviews at companies
fail for non-technical reasons.
This is usually described by the
company as a “poor culture fit”.
Nine times out of ten, however,
culture fit just means enthusiasm
for what a company does.
Companies want candidates who
are excited about their mission.
This carries as much weight at
many companies as technical
skill. This makes sense. Excited
employees will be happier and
work harder.
The problem is that this
can be faked. Some candidates
manage to convince every
company they talk to that it’s
their dream job, while others
(who are genuinely excited) fail
to convince anyone. We’ve seen
this again and again. The solution
is for everyone to get better
at showing their enthusiasm.
This is not permission to lie. But
interviewing is like dating. No
one wants to be told on a first
date that they are one option
among many, even though this
is usually the case. Similarly,
most programmers just want a
good job with a good paycheck.
But stating this in an interview
is a mistake. The best approach
is to prepare notes before an
interview about what you find
exciting about the company, and
bring this up with each interviewer
when they ask if you have
any questions. A good source of
ideas is to read the company’s
recent blog posts and press
releases, and note the ones you
find exciting.
This idea seems facile. I
imagine you are nodding along
as you read this. But (as anyone
who has ever interviewed can
tell you) a surprisingly small
percentage of applicants do this.
Carefully preparing notes on
why you find a company exciting
really will increase your pass
rate. You can even reference
the notes during the interview.
Bringing prepared notes shows
preparation.
2. Study common
interview concepts
A large percentage of interview
questions feature data structures
and algorithms. For better
or worse, this is the truth. We
gather question details from
our candidates who interview at
YC companies (we’ll be doing
an in-depth analysis of this
data in a future article), and
algorithm questions make up
over 70% of the questions that
are asked. You do not need to
be an expert, but knowing the
following list of algorithms and
data structures will help at most
companies.
• Hash tables
• Linked lists
• Breadth-first search, depthfirst
search
• Quicksort, merge sort
• Binary search
• 2D arrays
• Dynamic arrays
• Binary search trees
• Dynamic programming
• Big-O analysis
Depending on your background,
this list may look trivial,
or may look totally intimidating.
That’s exactly the point. These
are concepts that are far more
common in interviews than they
are in production web programming.
If you’re self-taught or
years out of school and these
concepts are not familiar to you,
you will do better in interviews if
you study them. Even if you do
know these things, refreshing
your knowledge will help.
A startlingly high percentage
of interview questions reduce to
breadth-first search or the use
of a hash table to count uniques.
You need to be able to write
a BFS cold, and you need to
understand how a hash table is
implemented.
Learning these things is not
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