I just received yet another rejection email, tonally similar to many of the others I&#x27;ve gotten. This paragraph in particular sticks out [problem details omitted]:<p>&quot;This was a tough decision. We enjoyed talking with you and saw strengths through various parts of the interview, in particular on the [design discussion] and [list traversal] problems. However we made the final decision because we didn&#x27;t see the overall level of coding we&#x27;re looking for, especially during the [interactive terminal-based application] problem. The rate of progress on this problem wasn&#x27;t as fast as we&#x27;d hoped and we weren&#x27;t able to build a nice, generic solution within the time available. There was also a fair amount of confusion on the out of bounds issue, which we feel was the type of bug that would have been caught faster by a more experienced engineer.&quot;<p>This is a pattern: when I&#x27;m given a trivial code problem or a design problem, I tend to do well, but live coding and whiteboards are trouble because I frequently make tiny mistakes (always unrelated to my understanding of the underlying algorithm). I know this about myself as a coder, which is why I obsessively test my own code to catch my own errors.<p>But, especially under stress, these mistakes are continuing to cost me job opportunities. I&#x27;ve purchased cracking the coding interview, programming interviews exposed, and I&#x27;ve done scores of practise questions online at sites like HackerRank, but I keep hearing the same thing back: &quot;You&#x27;re clearly smart, but you didn&#x27;t do well on the whiteboard, so fuck off.&quot; I&#x27;ve heard some variation of that nearly a dozen times in the past six months.<p>I&#x27;m at my wits end. I&#x27;m consumed with self doubt (which doesn&#x27;t help in the interviews). I&#x27;m depressed, I don&#x27;t know what is wrong with me, and I don&#x27;t know what more I can do.<p>Should I just burn my CS degree and get a job a burger king? At the very least the interview would be shorter.
Ask HN: What do you do if you can't pass technical interviews?