3. How to ace that interview

Your interview begins the moment you have entered the room and a lot of things can happen between that moment and the time when you’re asked to introduce yourself — your body language and the fact that you’re smiling while greeting them plays a big role, especially when you’re interviewing for a start-up as culture-fit is something that they extremely care about. You need to understand that as much as the interviewer is a stranger to you, you’re a stranger to him/her too. So, they’re probably just as nervous as you are.

It’s important to view the interview as more of a conversation between yourself and the interviewer. Both of you are looking for a mutual fit — you are looking for an awesome place to work at and the interviewer is looking for an awesome person (like you) to work with. So, make sure that you’re feeling good about yourself and that you take the charge of making the initial moments of your conversation pleasant for them. And the easiest way I know how to make that happen is to smile.

There are mostly two types of interviews — one, where the interviewer has come with come prepared set of questions and is going to just ask you just that irrespective of your profile and the second, where the interview is based on your CV. I’ll start with the second one.

This kind of interview generally begins with a “Can you tell me a bit about yourself?”. At this point, 2 things are a big NO — talking about your GPA in college and talking about your projects in detail. An ideal statement should be about a minute or two long, should give a good idea on what have you been doing till now, and it’s not restricted to academics. You can talk about your hobbies like reading books, playing sports, meditation, etc — basically, anything that contributes to defining you. The interviewer will then take something that you talk about here as a cue for his next question, and then the technical part of the interview begins. The motive of this kind of interview is to really check whether whatever you have written on your CV is true or not:

Anyone who has actually solved the problem would be able to answer at multiple levels. They’ll be able to go down into the brass tracks or else they’d get stuck.

- Elon Musk

There would be a lot of questions on what could be done differently or if “X” was used instead of “Y”, what would have happened. At this point, it’s important to know the kind of trade-offs that is usually made during implementation, for e.g. if the interviewer says that using a more complex model would have given better results, then you might say that you actually had less data to work with and that would have lead to overfitting. In one of the interviews, I was given a case-study to work on and it involved designing algorithms for a real-world use case. I’ve noticed that once I’ve been given the green flag to talk about a project, the interviewers really like it when I talk about it in the following flow:

Problem > 1 or 2 previous approaches > Our approach > Result > Intuition

The other kind of interview is really just to test your basic knowledge. Don’t expect those questions to be too hard. But they would definitely scratch every bit of the basics that you should be having, mainly based around Linear Algebra, Probability, Statistics, Optimisation, Machine Learning and/or Deep Learning. The resources mentioned in the Minimal Resources you need for preparation section should suffice, but make sure that you don’t miss out one bit among them. The catch here is the amount of time you take to answer those questions. Since these cover the basics, they expect that you should be answering them almost instantly. So, do your preparation accordingly.

Throughout the process, it’s important to be confident and honest about what you know and what you don’t know. If there’s a question that you’re certain you have no idea about, say it upfront rather than making “Aah”, “Um” sounds. If some concept is really important but you are struggling with answering it, the interviewer would generally (depending on how you did in the initial parts) be happy to give you a hint or guide you towards the right solution. It’s a big plus if you manage to pick their hints and arrive at the correct solution. Try to not get nervous and the best way to avoid that is by, again, smiling.

Now we come to the conclusion of the interview where the interviewer would ask you if you have any questions for them. It’s really easy to think that your interview is done and just say that you have nothing to ask. I know many people who got rejected just because of failing at this last question. As I mentioned before, it’s not only you who is being interviewed. You are also looking for a mutual fit with the company itself. So, it’s quite obvious that if you really want to join a place, you must have many questions regarding the work culture there or what kind of role are they seeing you in. It can be as simple as being curious about the person interviewing you. There’s always something to learn from everything around you and you should make sure that you leave the interviewer with the impression that you’re truly interested in being a part of their team. A final question that I’ve started asking all my interviewers, is for a feedback on what they might want me to improve on. This has helped me tremendously and I still remember every feedback that I’ve gotten which I’ve incorporated into my daily life.

That’s it. Based on my experience, if you’re just honest about yourself, are competent, truly care about the company you’re interviewing for and have the right mindset, you should have ticked all the right boxes and should be getting a congratulatory mail soon 😄