Reprogramming my Mentality in Technical Interviews

I have an on-site interview tomorrow, and have decided that I am going to approach the technical component a little differently than I usually do.  It's easy, in an interview situation, to feel like I am in a position where the wrong answer could tank my career, and it's pretty obvious that that mentality is not going to be helpful.  Instead, I am going to approach my technical interview as though I were getting to spend an hour debugging/problem solving with a partner, which is something that I love to do.

While I was in Launch Academy, I would take an afternoon "break" from studying and ask in Slack whether anyone in my cohort would like an extra set of eyes on a problem.  It was a lot of fun listening to someone else walk me through what they wanted their code to be doing, and help them strategize how to get there from what the code was currently doing.  If I can approach a problem in a technical interview like one of those afternoon "breaks," hopefully I can focus on the actual problem in front of me, instead of the future ramifications of a wrong answer.

This mental reprogramming reminds me of someone I met on my exploratory trip to the Bay Area, back before I had begun Launch Academy.  I spent a few days shadowing software engineers at their jobs so that I could create a mental picture of what my future day-to-day would look like.  One morning, on the train into San Fransisco, I had someone approach me and ask if I was in tech.  I explained that I would be attending a programming bootcamp, and the man on the train told me that succeeding in a bootcamp is all about the mentality you have going in.  No matter what, it was going to be stressful and difficult, but he recommended that I view it as a "vacation in Japan."  I might not fully understand the language, and it would be easy to get turned around, but it was also an incredible experience that I was getting to fulfill. 

Some day I will actually visit Japan, but until then I will always have Launch Academy.  Plus, in case I ever lose that "lost" feeling, I will always have technical interviews.