Rehearsal

Rehearsal#

Everything in this course is knowledge, and knowledge is not what fails in an interview.

You already believed, before you started reading, that reading beats pasting and that verifying beats assuming. That belief is not what decides your round. What decides it is what your hands do at minute zero with a clock running — and that is trained, not decided.

The one number#

If you take a single thing from this course, take this: record a forty-five minute session and count the lines you accepted without reading.

It works as a diagnostic for three reasons. It is objective — you either read it or you did not. It predicts the exact failure that ends most rounds, which is being unable to answer "what does this do?" And it is almost always higher than people expect, which is what makes it land.

Count it again a week later. It is one of the few interview skills where you can watch a number move.

Putting the pressure back#

Practice at your desk is missing the two things that cause the failures: the clock, and being watched.

The clock is easy. Forty-five minutes, stop when it ends, including the closing summary. Do not extend because you were close — being close and out of time is the exact situation you are rehearsing for.

Being watched is the harder half, and the more important one. Three approximations, in increasing fidelity:

• Record yourself with audio, narrating as though to an interviewer. Free, and more effective than it sounds. Narrating to nobody feels ridiculous for roughly ten minutes and then starts changing what you do — which is the entire point.
• Pair with another engineer and ask them to interrupt twice with "what does that do?" That one question, asked unpredictably, trains the habit everything else depends on.
• Do a real mock with someone who has run these rounds and can tell you what they would have written down.