How to Not Fail a Technical Interview

Key Takeaways

Look, I get it. Interview prep sucks. It's stressful. It's timeconuming. And it feels like no matter how hard you work, you're never quite ready. Now, I was in this exact same position. I was making these same five mistakes over and over again and failing technical interviews, even though I thought I was more than qualified for the jobs. So, today, I'm going to save you the time and break down the five mistakes most people make in technical interviews that cause them to fail. The first mistake is randomly grinding leak code. And this is by far the most common one that I see. Now, here's what happens. You decide you want to get a job at Google or Amazon or Meta or whatever. You hear that you need to start practicing coding problems. So, you go to Le Code, you create an account, you see 3,000 problems staring at you, and you just start solving. No plan, no structure, no direction. You pick a problem that looks interesting, you solve it, you move on to the next one. Now, maybe you sort by most popular or most likes. You pick a company, whatever, and you just work your way down the list. You are grinding. You're putting in the hours. You feel like you're doing the work. You solve 50 problems and you feel pretty good. You hit 100 and you start thinking you're getting somewhere. You hit 200 and you're convinced that you're ready. Like you've solved 200 problems, right? That has to count for something, but it doesn't. And then you walk into an actual interview, the interviewer gives you a problem and it's not exactly like anything you've seen before. Maybe it's a little bit similar, maybe there's a twist, maybe it's completely different. And your brain just freezes. You don't even know where to start. you're panicking and you're sitting there thinking, you know, I solved 200 problems. How is this even possible? Now, here's why. You weren't learning patterns. You were just memorizing answers. There is a massive difference. When you grind random problems without understanding the underlying concepts, you're just training yourself to recognize specific questions. The second something changes, different input, different constraint, different edge case, you're completely lost. Random grinding gives you a false sense of progress. You're checking boxes. You're seeing green check marks. You feel productive, but you're not actually building the skills that matter in a real interview. Mistake number two is passive learning. And honestly, this one is sneaky because it feels like you're being productive. You're watching YouTube videos, you're reading blog posts, you're going through tutorials, you're spending hours every single day studying, and at the end of the week, you feel like you've done a lot, like you've learned a lot. You can talk about dynamic programming. You know what a binary search tree is. You've seen someone solve the classic interview problems, but here's the thing. You haven't actually done anything. You've just watched other people do it. Think about it. You watch a 20-minute video where some guy explains how to solve a lengthless problem. He walks through the logic, writes out the code, explains every line. You're nodding along. You know, it makes sense. You get it. And then 2 days later, you sit down to solve a similar problem on your own, and you can't even remember where to start. You're just staring at a blank screen trying to recall what the guy in the video did, and it's just gone. That's not a you problem. That's how the brain works. Watching someone else do something is not the same as doing it yourself. It's like watching someone do push-ups and thinking you're getting stronger. You might understand the mechanics, but your muscles haven't done any work. Passive learning gives you familiarity, not confidence. You'll recognize a problem in an interview. You'll feel like you've seen it before, but you won't actually be able to solve it when it actually counts. And the interviewer is going to see right through this when he asks you something that you weren't prepared for or you didn't see the guy in the YouTube video explain to you directly. Now we go to the third mistake, which is ignoring communication. And this one catches a lot of people off guard. Most engineers think that technical interviews are just about writing the correct code. Get the right answer, pass the test, get the job simple, right? Wrong. Interviewers are evaluating way more than just your code. They're watching how you think, how you approach a problem, how you ask clarifying questions, how you explain your reasoning, how you handle when you get stuck, and how you communicate trade-offs between different solutions. If you solve the problem perfectly, but you can't explain why your solution works, that's a massive red flag. If you go silent for 5 minutes while you're thinking, that's red flag. If you just start coding without talking through your approach first, that's a red flag. And these are all reasons why you will fail the interview. Now, here's the problem. Most people practice alone. They sit in their room, right? They open lead code. They start typing a bunch of problems, you know, solving them whatever in silence. They're not talking. They're not explaining. Just them in the screen. Then they get into a real interview and suddenly there's another human being who's watching them expecting them to talk, expecting them to explain their thinking and they just freeze because they've literally never practiced to do this, right? And this is a skill on its own. Now, I've talked to engineers who were technically brilliant, way smarter than me, but they just kept failing interviews because they couldn't communicate under pressure. they'd solve the problem in their head, but they couldn't articulate it out loud. Or they get stuck and completely go silent instead of talking through their thought process and giving themselves a chance with the interviewer. Now, the fourth mistake on my list is having weak fundamentals. And I see this all the time. Engineers get excited about interview prep. They want to jump straight into the hard problems. You know, they start solving mediums and hards on leak code on day one, and they want to feel like they're making progress on the real interview questions. But here's the thing, they don't actually understand the basics. They don't really know what a hashmap is, right? Or how it works under the hood. They can't explain the difference between BFS and DFS without googling it. They're shaky on bigo notation. Usually, they learned all of this stuff in college three or four or five years ago, and they just assume that they still remember. Then they get into an interview. They solve the problem, or at least they think they did, and then the interviewer asks them a follow-up question. You know, what's the time complexity of this solution? Why did you use a hashmap instead of an array? Can you walk me through how this algorithm handles, you know, this XYZ edge case? and they just can't answer it confidently. They stumble or they guess. And that uncertainty shows the interviewer that they don't really have a full understanding of the fundamentals and what it is that they're doing. Now, you can't build a house on a weak foundation. And you can't pass technical interviews without solid foundations as well. I don't care how many leak code problems you've solved. If you can't explain basic data structures and analyze time complexity, you are going to struggle and I'd be very surprised if you get an offer after a technical interview. Now, we move to the fifth mistake, which is having no structure. And honestly, this is the one that ties everything together. Now, here's what most people's interview prep looks like. They watch a YouTube video about dynamic programming. They solve a random lead code problem about arrays. They read a blog post about system design that they found on Reddit. They buy the book, you know, cracking the coding interview and read the first few chapters before it starts collecting dust on their shelf. And they're hoping that all of this, you know, somehow adds up to something coherent. Like, if they consume enough random content on the internet, they'll eventually be ready for interviews. But it never works that way. There's no curriculum, no progression, no one telling you what to focus on first, what to learn next, or whether you're actually ready for interviews. You have no idea if you're on the right track. You don't know what gaps you have, and you're just kind of wandering around in the dark hoping that you stumble onto the right path. Now, this is why people spend 6 months preparing and still fail for interviews. It's not about the time, it's about how you use that time. You could spend 500 hours preparing, but if those 500 hours are scattered and unfocused, you're just not going to get the results. So, with that said, how do you actually avoid all five of these mistakes? Well, first, you need a system. Something that gives you structure. Something that teaches you patterns instead of just throwing random problems at you. Something that forces you to actively practice, not passively watch videos. And something that tells you exactly what to learn and in what order. Now, that's exactly why when I was doing this, I used Algo Expert. And honestly, it completely changed the game for me because instead of doing 3,000 random problems with no direction, Algo Expert just has 200 handpicked questions. And I mean handpicked. They're specifically chosen to cover the patterns and the concepts that actually show up in real interviews at companies like Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple. And they also cover the foundations. So again, you learn how to think about these problems and that pattern recognition rather than just memorize it. Now, every single question has a two-part video explanation. And honestly, for me, this was the most helpful part because the first part of the video explanation teaches you how to think about the problem, what pattern to use, why it works, how to approach it, and overall helps you build that intuition that you need in order to solve a problem that you haven't seen before. When you go into a coding interview, this isn't a memorization game. It's problem solving. And if no one ever taught you how to do the problem solving correctly, how are you going to pass the interview? So regardless of the questions that you want to practice, especially at the beginning, you need that in-depth explanation, which is why I really value this platform. Now, as well as that, they also have a second part of this video, which is a complete code walkthrough where you see the solution that's built line by line. So this isn't some random YouTuber explaining things. It's structured learning from someone who's actually passed interviews at Google and Facebook. Now, they also have a data structures and algorithms crash course that covers all of the fundamentals that you need to start with, but without wasting a ton of time. So big notation, complexity, all of the major data structures, it's covered. So if you're rusty on that, you can start with the foundations, learn those quickly, and then move into the questions and everything is organized by category and difficulty. So you have easy, medium, hard, and very hard, which in my opinion is a lot more accurate than the ratings you would have on lead code. So you always know what kind of problems to work on and the order you should go about doing them. Now, another major thing that a lot of people skip is actually learning the specific type of interview prep based on the type of interview they're going to go into. Now, Algo Expert has a lot of other products that aren't just this leak code style problem. For example, they have systems expert for system design, right? Front-end expert for front-end roles, ML expert, infrastructure expert, iOS expert. They have all of these different types of products which are all bundled in the price. So, no matter what type of niche you're going into, not only do you get the core problems that you always need to know, but the exact expertise and niche type problems that you're going to get asked in an iOS interview or a front-end interview. Now, look, I'm not just saying all of this. This is actually the platform that I personally used. I solved over 70 questions on it when I was getting started because when I started and I was using YouTube and Le code and other platforms, I was never building that intuition. But when I watched the videos on Algo Expert, legitimately this is the reason I was able to pass my interviews very quickly because I could build that problem solving skill which I wasn't getting from any of the other methods. You have the interactivity of course you have enough problems but again the videos and the structure and explanation to me is the most valuable part and that's why I personally recommend it. It feels a lot more like a system and a structure rather than just kind of like randomly picking questions which can be really discouraging especially when you get into the hundreds. Now again, like I said, I got an offer from Microsoft for this, which I accepted. I also got offers from Shopify, and then later on in life, Google. And this isn't because I'm a genius. It's not because I got lucky, but it's because I stopped making the mistakes that I mentioned in this video. Now, right now, Algo Expert actually has a special offer where you can get all of the products that I mentioned, which is usually worth over $600, for just $119. I'm going to leave the link in the description, but you can see for yourself that over 200,000 engineers have used this to land jobs at top tech companies. And if you're tired of making the same mistakes and wondering why you're not getting offers, this is your sign to change your approach, right? Whether you use Algo Expert, it doesn't matter, but you need to use something that gives you that structure and teaches you that intuition. Anyways, the links for everything that I mentioned here will be available in the description down below. Good luck preparing for your coding interviews.