How do you guys do it? I just had my first encounter yesterday for a data engineering job and I sincerely fucked up. My mind went completely blank, I was thinking along all the wrong lines and I think I didn’t even correctly understand the question, because there were all these words that I’ve never heard of.
How do you even prepare for something like that?
One thing that might help is having a broader background in the field and its concepts. If an interview question can feature a bunch of concepts you’ve never heard of, you might have missing bits of background you could learn more about to fill in gaps. You could go from “I have no idea what a hadoop is or what it’s for” to “I know people like to use Hadoop for X and it works basically like Y but I’ve never used it myself” pretty quickly.
Anyone useful as a computer-related employee is still going to encounter problems they don’t immediately understand on a daily basis, though. You need to be able to happily and confidently say “I have no idea what X is, what is that?”. An interviewer will be happier to get a clear idea of what you don’t know than to see you struggle to pretend to know things, because someone who pretends to know what they don’t is a danger in a real workplace. And maybe they’ll actually teach you enough to let you solve the problem, or, failing that, to be able to answer the next interviewer who asks you about that thing.