Behind the Scenes of a Technical Interview

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!I’ve sat on both sides of the interview table several times over the past decade. You might be surprised to hear that I’ve often been just as nervous interviewing candidates as I was when being interviewed!Nearly all the interview advice out there is about the candidate’s side, but understanding the other side can also help you prepare. Let me show you what I’ve seen firsthand, and what I’d bet is happening at the company you just interviewed with.If you recently got rejected after an interview, this might explain what actually happened.One caveat, because I’ve been on the receiving end of this: A couple of my recent interviews were run entirely by AI. These were screening rounds, but a growing share of job seekers now report being interviewed by a bot somewhere in the process. Everything below assumes you reached a person.Most teams have no standard prepYou might assume companies train people to run interviews. Many don’t.In practice, your interviewers may be much less prepared than it seems. Their prep might look like this: “Here’s a rubric from three years ago, figure it out.” Or: “Let’s grab a conference room between meetings and decide what to ask.”The questions are often whatever the interviewer personally studied when they were job hunting. These days, they may be generated with an LLM the morning of.Then the panel negotiates. One person wants to quiz candidates on data structures and algorithms for a role in which they design websites. Another insists system design is essential for a junior level position. People default to what was done to them and assume it’s normal because it was normal to them.What’s normal to the spider is chaos to the fly.“Scoring” that isn’t really scoringAfter an interview, some processes I