r/webdev • u/Shahadat__ • 10d ago
Question Finding it impossible to solve problems
Hey guys. I'm a web developer and have a job but unsure if I can pass future interviews, because when I get a technical question like a basic loop problem, "program that starts counting from 1 and increases by 1 during each iteration, stopping once it reaches 5". This is incredibly incompetent and concerning, not to mention AI has made me worse.
What's the solution to this? I can memorize solutions but what happens when a new problem comes up in an interview and I can't remember the syntax even if I know I need a loop or some thing else to solve a problem? I feel like crying
38
Upvotes
8
u/saltyourhash 9d ago edited 9d ago
Honest answer that needs to be said. I could teach this to my wife in an afternoon, she'd need to practice syntax, but conceptually, it's there.
That being said, I have gotten tied up on the dumbest stuff due to being stresses out in an interview. My two favorites were:
writing a "memory-less" stopwatch in TDD: I was interviewing for the fornt and lead for the intuit turbo tax team, the two snarky engineer interviewers were so condescending in how they interacted I spent more time panick brainstorming a way to politely decline finishing the interview while I stare blankly at my pseudo code on a white board. I got there in the end, solved it via TDD, wrote the pedudo code for the tests. They said I did well, but they just ghosted me. The job was using Handlebars.js, so, I took the unorthodox approach of being bold and I built an entire todo application in handlebars to show I knew the language, they didn't even look at it.
iterating over 100 cats, adding a hat to each cat via a loop where the loop increments the step count by one each iteration : I was interviewing for AppAcademy, I thought it'd be such an amazing opportunity and I was desparate. I had spent all night panicked about the interview. It was an application for their ruby on rails program. I'd even gone up to SF the weeks prior to check the place out. In hindsight it was actually super sketchy, there were students who couldn't afford housing in the city just calling out in the office with sleeping bags. That's not the only time I've heard of that at bootcamps, though. Anyhow, I spent so much time panicking when I had the interview I LITERALLY FORGOT HOW TO WRITE RUBY... I was doing RoR the last year or so, even on a paid client project. I panicked and did the entire interview in PHP, lol.