Software Engineer Interview Experience

Interview process

This was my first interview ever, and I was nervous. However, the introduction went really well and caught the interviewer’s attention. At the start, I mentioned that my areas of interest were "geopolitics" and "music production". Since many people these days enjoy discussing geopolitics, he followed up by saying he was interested in it too and asked me about recent events I knew about. For the first 10 minutes, we talked about geopolitics, and It was a memorable first 10 minutes in my very first interview. Then we got back to him asking me technical questions. I think i had a good first impression. He first stated with asking general programming questions, about Object oriented programming, Polymorphism. I was good here. Then we got on topic of Database. Here i fumbled big time. First question "what is database?" My nerves answer: a place where we store data. I felt it me fumbling, i was nerves and never practice about database, SQL for this interview. Then here we go another fumble, He asked "What are operators in SQL?" I brain-fogged and said am not aware of this answer, i knew but in moment i did not understand the meaning of "operators", they he clarifies saying addition, subtraction. And it clicked in my mind, but still my answer was in 2 lines: "Plus, minus, subtraction, division, Arithmetic, Logical, Comparison" thats it. I should have expanded on it and explained in little more detail. I think i did this because it was my first interview and in my mind going through was i fumbled very bad and am not gonna be selected i lost my all hopes in between the interview. till now its been in total 20-25 minutes, we switched to last part which was coding part. He said he asked this question to last guy and he did not able to answer this question. I was confident on my problem solving and coding skills, but yeh as you could tell by now i suck at communication. The coding question was: "Given a array on integers return a frequency of each element". I though this is pretty easy and first explain him my first approach to problem, start implementing, code ran and passed on first run. Explain him what approach i used and why everything in detail, with time and space complexities. So the two best parts were long intro and last coding problem. I also asked him at the end what I could improve on, and he mentioned my theoretical knowledge. He explained that interviewers don’t expect you to recite textbook definitions word‑for‑word, but they do expect you to understand and be able to talk about the main ideas or high‑level concepts behind each topic. I somewhere knew that am not getting selected, and i was right.