What should you do after you fail the technical interview?

Been there before. This is my advice from a past article:

Embrace How Random the Programming Interview Is

Ben Halpern ・ Mar 4 '17 ・ 2 min read

#careeradvice

Not sure why spongebob keeps coming up 😂

Yeah, it could be slightly gut wrenching the first times. My focus when I started out in software development was to pass the interviews.

Today it has shifted to also finding out do I want to work here?

For me the best interviews are more like good discussions and if a company treats it more like a pass or fail exam rather than a discussion I see that as a warning sign that this is how they will see your work as well. A continuous individual pass or fail exam rather than work together to build the best possible product.

And yeah, don't be discouraged about failing an interview, everyone who's ever done anything interesting has too. (Probably)

First accept the failure. It's never going to be permanent. Understand the cause for failure and work on getting it right next time. Interviews are meant to assess a person to the job at a specific situation and it is by no means to test your capability. As a matter of fact everyone is capable. Let it go, but learn from failures. Pat in your back that you failed this time, but you won't fail the next time! Keep going.. good luck.

Accept the failure and as kitschy as it might sound, embrace it. There's nothing wrong with failing.

Once you do that try to understand what caused it, try to find other's solutions to similar technical questions. See if and how different your answer was. Also, not all failures are because of a wrong answer, it's sometime the process that lead you to it that failed you.

As an interviewer I always advice candidates to approach me whether by email or phone and ask why they failed. I understand, It is sometimes hard to accept the reasons and you might not always agree with the interviewer but if you really want to grow because of the experience you must be know why you failed.

Greater people already said it, best way to learn is to fail.
Whatever you do, never ever give up!

Hope this helps.

Look at the interview as an experience, from which you can take something and improve. Of course it's not the best feeling in the world to get rejected. Yet over time I understood that if I really like some specific company and couldn't get there - I'm still closer, cause I know what to improve and now it will be only a matter of time and practice.

For me, this quote essentially covers what I feel when I fail an interview.

When one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us. By Alexander Graham Bell

I just think that we should not be too hard on yourself and just reflect on what we could have done better after a fail interview.

Sometimes it just might mean that this company might not be the correct company for you which they had did the favour in letting you know.

So that you can pursue a much better opportunity in a different company. I will always have my pity party and dust it off to go and apply to another company with what I had learnt from my fail interview.

I failed a technical interview but I asked for some tips on how and where I could improve and got really good and useful feedback. I helped me a lot by showing where I actually should put my efforts. For example, I thought I need to know frameworks and all kind of tools they put in job descriptions, but instead I was told to focus on things like functional programming and other basics and to become really fluent in them. It paid off. I think of that interview as an enlightening experience.

Btw, 1.5 years later I was invited there again and the interview went really well.

So, my advice is to ask for advice from your interviewers. :)

I had two significant tech interviews in my job hunt.

One was a combination of on-the-spot programming in Javascript (which I wasnt strong in at the time), and Ruby whiteboarding. I didnt get that job, and I felt devastated. But it provoked me to beef my JS skills up.

The second was a code review of the takehome they'd given me some days back. I took notes while they tore my code apart - in a nice way, but they still tore it apart lol. That night I took time to incorporate all their feedback into my code, and I actually felt myself become a better programmer in the process. That company actually suspended the hiring process for that position due to budget constraints.

Just like others have said: the only helpful reaction to a failed tech interview is to learn and grow from it. Now are tears and frustration and a deep-dive into caramel icecream (my personal favorite) necessary? Yeah sure sometimes (ok all the time!), but not helpful. There's nothing that cannot be learned - so focus on learning and the rest will always be worked out.

Get up, learn and kill it in the next one! Basically, we as developers are in a journey finding solutions to problems. This also means getting answers.

If I don't know an answer I tell them up-front then describe how I'd go about getting it. It's not like we can memorize everything, especially if we're stretching outside of our comfort zone by pursuing a position that will force us to grow!

I haven't failed one yet, but if I did I would definitely ask for feedback and study up on where I am lacking. (And I like to talk to other devs about their interviews! I learned about JS hoisting through this and it WAS a question in a technical interview!)

I failed my first tech screen, and the company was unusually forgiving. They gave me homework on a particular topic, and said, “let us know everything you can about X when you come back”, and that showed I could learn the new material quickly. I wish there was a bit more innovation like that, but I’m appreciating everyone’s answers and views from their experiences here.

After failing countless of interviews and hit literally rock bottom in my confidence what I did was I asked for helpful advice, feedback and push myself more.

It was always tough to face failure experience frankly, but I have to recognize the gap without being painful. I tried to remember what's the point and core during the interview. If I have a chance to get feedback, I tried to get it. And I feel I'm not alone according to this page. rejected.us/

nice article.

• remember that coding and solving problems in software engineering is not the same as answering tricky quizzes during technical interviews.
• tell yourself that every failure helps you to improve and do better the next time
• send an email to the company/interviewer if you can get feedback about the tech interview. some emails might go unanswered, in some you will get a very generic and politically correct reply ( which is basically useless) but in some cases, you might get some valuable info to let yourself learn from the experience.
• try to go through all the questions and see if you can - in a more relaxed state and with the help of google - finally answer them properly
• keep a "diary" of all the questions and periodically go through them. ( your skill will have grown over time and you will smile at the memory of how you struggled to answer some of them)
• practice, practice, practice i wrote about it this morning as well ;-)

That is a twist of life for sure. That just goes to show hiring processes aren't always the best. Thanks for sharing! Also, love this image haha.