How i failed my first Live Coding Test

After months of sending me emails about how I was a good fit for their team, I decided to give it a go and had fully passed the technologies test and personality test so I had scheduled the live coding test for Friday at 5 pm.

On that fateful Friday, after weeks of mentally preparing on codewars with all kinds of Python problems, the due day came, I was more nervous than usual (As I always I’m during tests and interviews)

As I waited for the interviewer to sign I kept dreaming of what questions we would be doing … “beep” … the interviewer finally signed in, a middle-aged guy quickly introduced himself and said we had thirty minutes to do two questions “You can run tests any time, however, once you move to the next question, you can’t return” he said and click the test began.

By now my mind was all over the place the default language was C++ which I had last written in my 4th year at campus, thankfully there was a python option which I quickly switched to before reading the question by now 3 minutes had passed.

The question was about clearing an interval out of a provided sorted range, with the examples after the question it seemed like an easy one

So I jumped straight to writing the algorithm to do this, by now 8 minutes had gone, the more I wrote, the more I realized it was more complex than I thought by now my mind was jumping back and forth between possible solutions, so I quickly typed the easiest.

The interviewer sat back in his chair and suddenly Arabic music started to blare off the speakers and he began to chat with a female voice as the music played on as I yawned with this coding problem … Ran the test … Failed So I typed the other option .. Ran the test … Failed … blinked and 8 minutes were left with a still half-baked algorithm.

I quickly submitted this wrong answer and moved on to the second question which was about creating an array of a provided array with its multiples except for the number the moment I moved my cursor to start typing, a voice came over the mic … “hey Isaac hope you’re done I’ll give you results in about an hour”

In a shaky voice, I replied “okay” and closed the browser tab knowing I had scored a perfect zero.

It was a great experience, I’ll keep pushing on with my programming journey, and maybe one day I’ll get better at interviews and tests.