Ask HN: How do you prepare to tech interview? Any tip and tricks?
A seasoned developer shares insights on preparing for tech interviews, emphasizing the importance of aligning one's strengths with the interview process. They suggest that many interviews may not reflect a candidate's true abilities and encourage applicants to focus on their unique skills. The advice includes being honest about one's working style and accepting that rejection is a normal part of the process.
- ▪The author has over 20 years of experience in development and has struggled with tech interviews.
- ▪They emphasize that many interviews do not align with their strengths and that it's important to find companies that match one's skills.
- ▪The author advises candidates to represent themselves honestly and to focus on their good attributes during interviews.
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| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269051 |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 17:01:11 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T17:07:38.860Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T17:07:43.352Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | g8ky1h6poECE |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
20+ year dev here, successful CTO, built many production systems, etc. I tend to bomb >50% of tech interviews.I started doing better when I realized most tech interviews are not aligned with my brain, and that is ok. I have bad recall for syntax or even for things I've built in the past if I'm not currently engaged with them. This can come across like I am a bullshitter, or wholly incompetent. I also stumble through leetcodes - I remember enough to identify to right approach but fumble knocking out solutions in 15 minutes.But this is fine! If everyone at a company has focused on powering through leetcodes to get the role, or the job demands photographic memory of HTTP codes ("what is code 428 used for?" An actual interview question I have seen...) I am probably not a good fit and won't…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.