Postponing Technical Interview with Hiring team?

Anxiety and nervousness comes from ambiguity. Your world is ambiguous because you know you have an upcoming interview, but you don't know what to expect from it. If you reduce this ambiguity, you will be less anxious and nervous when it comes to prepare.

Try doing the following:

• Ask the recruiter what to expect from the technical interview
  • Ask the recruiter if the technical interview is going to be a DSA interview or more of a practical coding challenge (that involves languages/tools that the job requirement asks of you)
    • If the interview is confirmed to be a DS&A interview, ask the recruiter if they can recommend specific DS&A topics you should focus your prep on.
• Once you have information from the recruiter, schedule the interview for the 22nd to give yourself the most amount of time to prep.
• Prep for the technical interview based on the recruiter's response.
  • If it's a DS&A interview, focus prep on the appropriate topics (if the recruiters gives you any). If the recruiter gives you no topics, then focus on general DS&A prep.
  • If it's a practical coding challenge, focus on building a simple toy project or two using relevant skills (the recruiter will usually tell you what they want to use).
• Prep until end of day Oct 20th.
• Do no studying Oct 21st. Take a break, go outside, and get a good 8+ hours of sleep. This is so that you won't be too anxious from having to prep the day right before the interview.

I agree with Jonathan about scheduling at the end of the time range. A team will usually schedule out interviews with different candidates, and even if there's a strong performance, they'll usually wait until all of the scheduled interviews have happened before making a decision. It's really rare to see a team interview a candidate, then decline the rest of the interviews because they have found their perfect candidate.

If you aren't prepared right now, it can only help you to schedule as far out in that time range as possible.

Thanks Jonathan and Charlie, appreciate your advice! I ended up having to schedule for October 18th, which is still somewhat towards the end of the range. Unfortunately, my recruiter wasn't able to give me any insight into the technical interview, so I guess I will just try for breadth instead of depth for this initial DSA prep, as well as looking into the programming language they use in the team. Hopefully, this strategy can help me a little, but let me know if there's something I can tweak!