Create Impact in Interviews

April 17, 2024

Aakash Dave

If you have been interviewing lately and getting rejected or not hearing back, here are some possible reasons. And if you just starting out, this list can surely give you an edge over the competition.

💡 Your projects don’t demonstrate crucial skills

Projects are a dime a dozen. Building clone websites or apps doesn't demonstrate critical thinking. It just shows that you can put together some code. However, companies work on challenging sets of problems and need talent that they can rely on. Unless your projects do that, you are just part of the herd.

Solution:

Pick a complex problem to solve! Work on problems that demonstrate problem-solving with robust system design, technical strength, and creativity. This will also help you have more content to talk about in your interviews besides just saying what class you took at school or some hackathon project.

🧐 Picking the right stack to work with

Just solving problems is not enough. You want to demonstrate clarity of choice, of why you picked a specific stack to work on, and what the alternatives are. We explain about this in our previous newsletter.

For example: you might have chosen Firebase, but you should be able to provide the reasoning for the same and talk about alternatives. This effectively sets you apart from the rest, putting you way ahead of the competition.

🧑‍💻 Know the engineering processes

Working at a company is more than just projects and tech stack. It's about understanding the process of being in sync with the team. Various tools from version controlling, project management, issue tracking etc. are used to make sure the development is a smooth process.

Tools like Github, Jira, Gitlab, etc.

Overall, Focus on building solutions, not projects!

🎉 We do a lot of those with our fellows at Colab.

This is us jamming system design with one of our Colab fellows on a sunny morning!

Colab Fellowships is focused on helping you become successful in your career by training you to be a pro and intern at multiple companies to build that strong experience.

We’ll stay in touch for more insider tips for you. Want to jam or have questions on these things, just hit us reply and we’ll help you to the best of our ability!

👋 Chat Soon, Cheers!

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