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What Giving Interviews Taught Me Beyond Getting an Internship

Interviews and coding assessments can be useful practice in explaining your work, handling uncertainty, reviewing AI-generated code, and prioritizing under deadlines.
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Internship interviews and coding assessments can teach you skills that last beyond any single application: explaining your work, handling uncertainty, supervising AI-generated code, and making sound decisions under time pressure. In his account of several interviews and assessments over the preceding month, Subhamoy Datta describes what he learned even when an interview or assessment did not lead to an offer or the next round.

Interviews teach you to explain what you know

Knowing a technology or finishing a project is not the same as explaining it clearly. In interviews, Datta had to describe projects, technologies, technical decisions, how systems behaved, and how he approached problems. Repeated practice helped him become more comfortable discussing what he had built and why he had made particular choices.

That distinction matters outside interviews, too: developers often need to make their reasoning understandable to teammates. A project explanation is stronger when it covers not only what the software does, but also the decisions and problem-solving behind it.

Repeated interviews can make uncertainty easier to handle

Datta says his fear of interviews eased after several rounds of practice. He also came to accept that he would not always know an answer immediately. Sometimes the useful next step was to think through the problem; sometimes it was to acknowledge that he did not know.

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With repetition, the interview began to feel more like a technical conversation than an unfamiliar event. That shift can help a candidate focus on the question and the reasoning in front of them instead of treating every uncertain moment as a failure.

AI coding agents need direction, review, and verification

Datta encountered questions about Claude Code and Codex and used AI agents while coding. His experience was that getting useful results depended on more than issuing a prompt: the developer had to provide context, describe the goal, break larger work into manageable tasks, and understand the code the agent produced.

A practical agent workflow

  1. Provide relevant context. Give the agent enough information about the codebase and its existing structure to work toward the intended change.
  2. State the goal clearly. Explain what should change and what outcome the task needs to achieve.
  3. Break up large tasks. Smaller steps make the work easier to direct and review.
  4. Inspect the changes. Understand what was generated and why rather than accepting it blindly.
  5. Redirect when needed. If the agent misunderstands the architecture, makes unnecessary changes, or repeats a failed approach, identify the problem and provide better direction—or take over.
  6. Test and verify. Check the final implementation rather than assuming that generated code works as intended.

An agent can produce code quickly, but speed does not ensure that it fits the architecture or solves the right problem. It may fix one issue while creating another. The developer remains responsible for spotting those problems, understanding the changes, debugging failures, and deciding whether to continue with the agent or handle the work directly.

Deadlines teach prioritization, not just speed

The assessments Datta describes allowed as little as a few hours or a couple of days to understand requirements, plan, implement, test, fix issues, and submit. Under that pressure, he had to decide what mattered most and where an AI agent could save time without making review less important.

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This is a judgment problem as much as a coding problem. Generating a first draft faster is of little value if there is no time left to find a defect. A workable plan leaves room to understand the requirements, review important changes, and verify the result before submission.

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Useful learning does not depend on getting the offer

Datta’s account is personal experience, not evidence that every candidate will improve in the same way. But it illustrates why an interview or assessment can still be worthwhile as a learning experience: he took away clearer communication, greater confidence, more practice with AI-agent review and debugging, and experience building under deadlines—even when the process did not produce an offer or advance him to another round.

After an interview or assessment, reflect on what was difficult: explaining a design choice, reasoning through an unfamiliar question, reviewing generated code, or choosing what to prioritize. Treating that specific challenge as feedback gives the experience value beyond the hiring decision.

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