Show Your Work On Your Interviews
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In This Issue:
Real feedback from a hiring manager who just rejected two of my candidates
Why the whiteboard round isn’t only about getting the right answer
The math class rule to follow on technical interviews
What interviewers actually write down while you’re solving
The question asking phase most candidates skip entirely
How to practice talking through code when you’ve spent a career working silently
I got feedback this week that I need to share with you, because it explains why technically strong engineers keep losing interviews they should win.
Quick background. I’ve got a client, a major bank, hiring senior software engineers. The hiring manager is tough. Not unfair, just tough. He’s been building teams there for years and he knows exactly what he wants. When he passes on a candidate, he tells me why, in detail, which makes him more valuable to me than ten clients who just say “not a fit.”
I sent him two candidates. Both had strong resumes. Both cleared the recruiter screen and the initial technical conversation without a scratch. On paper, either one should’ve gotten an offer.
Both got rejected at the whiteboard round.
When I called him for feedback, he didn’t talk about their code. He didn’t say they got the problem wrong. Here’s what he said, almost word for word:
“They couldn’t talk through the solution. It should be like math class. You can’t just tell the teacher your answer. To get full credit, you have to show your work. It’s the same with interviews. I want to see the reasoning behind the solution and the types of questions they ask.”
That’s the whole issue in four sentences. And after a decade of collecting rejection feedback from hiring managers, I can tell you this exact failure shows up constantly. Candidates just never hear it stated this plainly, because rejection emails say “we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates” instead of the truth.
So let me break down what he actually meant, because there’s more in that math class analogy than most engineers realize.
The Answer Was Never the Point
Both of my candidates approached the whiteboard session the way most engineers do. They read the problem, went quiet, thought hard, and produced a solution.
