Title: I&#x27;m a mid-senior level software engineer with 5+ years of industry experience and making $100,000+. I don&#x27;t consider myself a bad software engineer, and yet I can&#x27;t seem to solve some basic problems on a white-board in 30-60min (i.e. traverse a heap, merge sorted arrays etc).<p>I joined my company as an intern ~5 years ago &amp; when I interviewed for the position I didn&#x27;t have to solve any white-board style interview questions etc., since it was an un-paid internship. After a few months I had demonstrated my ability to write code they made me an offer.<p>When I now casually look around and apply for mid-to-senior level positions I cannot seem to get past phone (coding interview) part, that involves solving some basic algorithm on collabedit. I get nervous and given I need to solve (perhaps a simple) problem in an optimal&#x2F;sub-optimal way in 30 minutes, my brain sort of shuts off and I cannot arrive at a clean solution, let alone solve the problem end-to-end.<p>I&#x27;m respected within the company, if you were to ask any colleague I have worked with whether I can write clean testable code that solves real business problems, everyone would attest that I absolutely can.<p>How do you create that environment of - &quot;Coding under pressure and someone looking at your code while you&#x27;re trying to think of how to solve a problem and your brain is thinking about everything other than a problem itself&quot;???<p>One idea is to just keep applying and failing until I become immune to it. But each failure kind of brings me down, and makes me think that I&#x27;m a bad engineer.<p>Last thing I want to mention is that I don&#x27;t blame the process itself. I think white-board style questions eliminate a lot of bad candidates.
I know that the process has to be rigorous because those jobs pay well. But there&#x27;s also extreme examples like the inventor of homebrew that got rejected by google because he couldn&#x27;t reverse a binary tree.
Upvote: