Lies my recruiter Told Me Part 1, True Lies

Part 1 in the ongoing series "Lies my recruiter told me"

"This will be a fairly techy interview, so brush up on your technical skills"

I knew that I interviewed better in college than I did two years ago, and I knew that at least part of it was because I had lost a lot of the academic knowledge. I even did toy programming projects to keep my skills up. But actually studying programming concepts specifically for an interview would have been cheating. It wasn't until it was specifically pointed out that this was a good idea that I realized that maybe interviewers would prefer me to look up polymorphism rather than guess during the interview (I got it on the second try). In general, I won't look up stuff for first-line phone interviews or snort HR screenings, but it's worthwhile if you know specific things will come up in an in-person.

"At the start of the interview, ask what they want, and tailor your answers to that." You can see why I thought this one was cheating, but it makes sense. As a bonus, it shows that you're really interested in the position. And if you do in the first stage of a circuit, you can look up stuff for the second stage.

I think that about sums it up for good advice. Even then, it was only useful because I was an idiot. We'll get to the funny stuff tomorrow.