Silicon Valley is a place, not a company. There are many companies in it and there is some variation in culture and expectation. So let me talk through some general rules and then talk about how this applies to your stereotypical we’re-cool-and-hip tech company.

A good way to think about attire is to dress as nicely as the best dressed people in that role. (You’ll also hear people say to dress one step up from the average person. I prefer the first statement as the second could lead to a person walking in in a tuxedo if all the employees were in a suit.)

Your goal is to basically blend in, without anyone thinking you didn’t even care enough to dress properly.

There are many great companies. You might be really happy at Google. Or maybe there's a better company for you. Google is not the be-all-and-end-all of companies. It is not the pinnacle of success.

And if you spend all your free time coding, you're going to probably be miserable and burn out. Chasing this dream of yours by getting narrowly focused on one company and spending all your time on it will probably not lead to success there.

The expectations and norms are generally to use a whiteboard for a technical interview. If you ask, some interviewers might happily let you use a paper and pen. Some will say okay, but not be happy about it. And some will flat out say no.

I’m in the last of these groups. I'll tell you no. I'll be gentle about it—I’ll tell you that in my experience, a whiteboard really works better. But I'll ask you to use a whiteboard unless there's some very good reason (think: medical need).

Well, what's stopping you? Go program. Stop waiting for someone else to hold your hand and physically press your fingers to the keys.

You are learning programming. You're learning the fundamentals. You're learning different ways of storing data. You might end up using those ways directly, or it might just stretch your mind and you'll create your own way of storing data for that program. Either way, storing data is a pretty important part of programming.

If you’re truly average — average intelligence, average coding skills, etc — then your odds of passing Google’s hiring process are pretty slim. Google’s hiring process is designed to hire the very good programmers, not the average ones (and I believe it does so reasonably effectively).

But, your calling yourself “average” doesn’t necessarily mean that you are. One’s impression tends to be a reflection of self-confidence as well their peer group’s skills. Those who think that they’re average are sometimes great, and vice versa.

Is there a relationship between performance in a technical interview and employee performance? I believe so, but it's a very hard thing to study.

The Silly Google Study

Google tried to study this, but the study was fundamentally flawed. What Google did was attempt to correlate interview scores with performance review score. Sounds fair, right?

At the right company, hiring committees can be incredibly valuable.

Hiring committees allow consistency in the process. Every candidate goes through the same decision-making group and will hopefully get held to the same standard. (Even if the company is large enough to merit multiple hiring committees, it’s still much easier to standardize a small group of hiring committees than a large group of interviewers.)

These committees have high standards, even in high-pressure times. Hiring committees avoid issues where teams might drop their standards because they’re desperate to hire someone. That person might be a value-add in the short term but be detrimental in the long run.

You don’t ask someone to be your friend, so why do you ask him or her to be your mentor? Think about your closest friends—or even your less close friends. When you asked them to be your friend, what were your terms? How often would you hang out? What would you do? What would the expectations be on each side?

Oh, you didn’t do any of that. You didn’t ask them to be your friend. That would be weird. Plus, how would they know if they like you before they know you? It’s a sort of ridiculous question to ask or answer.

But somehow or other, you just … became friends. Maybe you just “fell” into friendship by hanging around each other enough. Maybe there was something specific that connected you, like having children the same age. Maybe someone introduced you two because you just moved to their city. Somehow or other, nothingness evolved into friendship.

In some fields, it's not looked at that negatively. For example, gaps aren't a big deal for software engineers, or across tech in general. That's because there is a shortage of good software engineers, so companies are more willing to look the other way on a little thing like this. They're also less rigid corporate environments, so they're more accepting of little quirks like this.

But in other fields, it is a bigger issue. Many explanations for taking a break pose a small concern.