Where to even begin when prepping for mid-senior level job interviews in 2026? What's your process?

Posted by SkellyJelly33@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 10 comments

Hey all. I'm at 5 year of experience and exploring some options that are available to me. I have a couple of interviews lined up with some smaller consultancy firms, but I'm honestly not sure where to even begin preparing.

I am making sure I can speak about everything on my resume of course, and that I'm able to talk up the projects and jobs I've worked on in the past. However I'm not sure what to prepare for in terms of technical interviews. Like should I focus more on brushing up my system design and architecture knowledge, the gritty details of the tech stack, or more on practicing my coding skills? I plan on doing at least a little bit of all them I guess.

It's been a few years since I did any interviewing, and those were for more junior level positions. Should I be worried about my leet code and coding from memory/by-hand skills? These have definitely atrophied since I rely heavily on IDE auto complete and AI tools to handle the grunt work of coding these days. I have not practiced leetcode in years and am quite rusty in it.

It seems like they could throw anything at me, which makes it hard to know what to prepare for.

So I'm curious if anyone has a good systematic approach to preparing for interviews, or other tips, tricks and/or things that I might need to prep for. Thanks in advance!

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greensodacan@reddit

I plan on doing at least a little bit of all them I guess.

I think this is the way to go.

As you get around senior level, the minor details of the code matter less (this was true before AI), and it's more important that you can demonstrate domain knowledge and discuss tradeoffs. So if you were asked to implement a feature, I'd want to know which design patterns you'd utilize, which libraries you'd reach for if any, what edge cases you can think of, and since AI is part of the workflow; what guard rails you'd want in place.

Ok-Pace-8772@reddit

See that's what I've always believed. Then why am I getting asked about queues and reference vs value types. I swear some people can't spot a senior even if hit in the face with it.

Fair. I suppose the argument there would be that you might need to help a junior debug or that your experience so far is quality experience and not just repeating your first year five times over.

I think it also says something about the reviewer. The worst developer I've worked with insisted on drilling candidates with a list of linguistic gotchas. It was embarrassing for candidate and didn't foster conversation. That in turn was embarrassing for us because it was like an ego fest. The thing was that's all this developer knew. He couldn't architect, didn't know design patterns, and hadn't kept up with his specialization in a decade. Now I see interviews that stress that sort of thing as red flags.

RandomPantsAppear@reddit

The interview situation right now is unreal. There is no way to optimize for it.

Some places will test you without AI.

Some places will test you primarily on how you use AI.

Some places will test you on systems design, to sidestep AI.

It’s unfortunate, but you need to be able to do it all right now.

Yoseattle-@reddit

Some will ask about PID or the event loop. Some will have you do a whole project and ask you to articulate all the different ways that you could have done authentication. Some will want to know details of your career progression dating back 10 years ago. Some will want to know about specific negative feedback your manager gave to you each step along the way.

Yup. I learned quick to pre-select problems (technical and interpersonal) in advance I wanted to talk about.

Otherwise I’d end up getting grilled about how I debugged a specific issue 15 years ago.

considerfi@reddit

I searched in late 2025. Ai has changed a lot since then but I'm not sure if companies have changed their interview process yet.

At least in fall 25, it was the usual coding assignment, then sometimes live coding, then system design. They say "it's not leetcode" but really live coding is all the same to me. Just because you didn't copy the question off leetcode doesn't mean it's not leetcode.

So yeah I practiced some leetcode, I take the blind 75 and try to at least hit all the medium or easy ones. Then I practiced system design, see hello interview. And then I got all the info on could from recruiters or Glassdoor about the interview process, fed it into ai and asked it to come up with interview questions. That works surprisingly well.

Good luck.

Much_Somewhere7831@reddit

TechJobFinder.com

mattgen88@reddit

I have to re think my entire interview strategy, I'll be honest.

I think I need to give out vague descriptions of what I want and have interviewees ask questions to gather requirements. Then ask them to just give me a general idea of what the expected code base will look like after iterations. I'm not sure coding skills are something I will be forced to quiz about any longer (thank goodness) and I can concentrate on communicating, analytical skills, code reviewing skills. I can ask about the things I care about, experience, problem solving, conflict resolution, culture fit, how people learn, independence.

It's a weird world right now

Lol it's literally random. One interview asks you high level system design, the next is Go specifics.

It's very very weird. It used to be kinda predictable. Not you need to infer based on vibes whether they want you to vibe code or not and answer appropriately.

It's crazy out there.