There is a particular moment in every web developer’s career when they find themselves sitting before a panel of severe-looking individuals, being asked whether they know the difference between an interface and an abstract class. It is a moment fraught with tension, as if one has mistakenly wandered onto the set of a particularly high-stakes game show, except instead of winning a car, the prize is the right to pay rent for another month.
And yet, many developers make the tragic error of transforming into human compiler warnings. They rattle off syntax rules, explain Big O notation with the fervour of a late-night televangelist, and appear increasingly like an AI chatbot that has been fine-tuned on Stack Overflow responses. In their quest to prove their technical prowess, they forget that they are, in fact, people.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Technical skill is vital. If you claim to be a front-end developer but your CSS looks like it was written in the dark by someone experiencing a mild electric shock, then yes, there may be issues. But here’s the thing: web development is rarely a solitary act of coding genius. It is, instead, a messy, collaborative business full of other human beings who all have different ideas about how things should be done, and who—heaven help us—might even ask you to explain your work in plain English.
Thus, the real trick to acing a developer interview isn’t just proving that you know your JavaScript from your Java. It’s demonstrating that you can function as a regular, communicative, and vaguely pleasant human being.
Consider, for instance, the fabled “behavioural question.” Many developers treat these as an inconvenient detour before they can return to discussing algorithms. A question such as, “Tell me about a time you handled a conflict in a team,” is met with a blank stare, followed by an awkward story about how they once used Git blame to identify the exact moment a colleague ruined everything. This is not, strictly speaking, the answer the interviewer was hoping for.
Equally dangerous is the “over-eagerness to impress” strategy. Here, the candidate is so keen to demonstrate their intellect that they begin explaining the entire history of computing, starting with Charles Babbage, before reaching the climax of their own personal experiences with recursive functions. Time slows. The interviewers age visibly. The meeting ends with nobody entirely sure what was just discussed.
The best candidates—those who tend to get the job—are not the ones who deliver flawless technical answers but the ones who manage to seem competent and enjoyable to work with. They show curiosity rather than arrogance. They talk like people instead of textbooks. They acknowledge that sometimes, despite their best efforts, even the best of us have committed the unforgivable sin of debugging with console.log.
So, developers, when you next find yourself in the hot seat, remember: know your stuff, yes, but also be someone others wouldn’t mind sitting next to in a meeting. The internet is built on technology, but its best parts are still powered by humans.