Why failing isn’t just good, It is necessary!

The thing I always tell myself when I go into “get a new job” mode is, let me test the waters and see where I stand in the interview process. Now we all know a good cv, resume can do wonders for you but as a tech person. A software engineer, we tend to get take home assignments and technical interviews with tech leads or senior programmers. A lot of the time we get generic leet code and hacker rank questions to start off.Give me a fizz buzz answer , or how about this bit map question. Although at times we do get more tailor or fun projects to do or finish up. Nothing screams “what a cool company” to me more than getting take home assignments of what I will actually be doing in that position I am applying for.

Having people from the company actually put in effort into questions they will ask candidates is always a good sign. Sometimes on real time interviews you might not know everything they are asking you or might not be able to type it all in the shared coding sandbox but its nice to engage with who ever is taking lead in the interview and talk about the problem and possible solutions.

Now a lot of the times this doesn’t go too well and you are just frozen and have no idea what to type or say next. Sometimes this is what we need to learn and progress. There’s many companies out there and many ways an interview can go.

I would argue having failed attempts can encourage you to seek out learning more about that one specific topic you tanked on and become better at it. Sometimes we can think that certain things are not really that relevant and skip over them until they get shoved down your interview without expecting it.

As developers, engineers and programmers we should strive to keep learning and see where we lack knowledge and jump into the fire. You can’t get better if you do not know what you are lacking. But what happens if you can’t fail because of downturn in the hiring market?

Well it’s hard to tell, probs will make another post about that next lol. Over all I would say the best option and shortest answer is to keep engaging with like minded individuals who you can learn by just hanging out or chatting about certain topics. Likewise this will hopefully encourage you to also learn something new often in order to keep the conversation fresh and interesting.