Technical Interviews

What can happen?

  • Technical Discussion
    • General topics:
      Architecture, DevOps, CI/CD, Frontend/Backend, Refactoring, Error handling, Git
      How is CI/CD making deployments safer?
      What are the benefits of decoupling Frontend/Backend?
    • Specific topic:
      Specific API, library/FW questions
      What are the React component lifecycle methods?
      How does DI work in .NET?
      What would be your approach to caching API responses in Spring?

       

What can happen?

  • Non-technical discussion
    • What is your experience with Agile methodology? 
    • What was the structure of the team?
    • What did you like and didn't like?
    • Motivation, values and other HR-stuff (more on that tomorrow)

What can happen?

  • Live coding
    • In an editor (10 - 30 min)

      Usually, a specific task related to language
       
    • Whiteboard (10 - 40 min)

      More broad, simpler
      Pseudocode
      Fizzbuzz

       

Technical discussion tips

 
  • Don't stay silent, but...
    • Don't overdeliver
    • Don't rush
    • Don't bullshit
    • Don't derail the discussion
  • Say your best guess (I think that..., Maybe...)
  • Think out loud
  • Ask for clarification
  • Try to understand the motivation behind the question and provide a different example

Live coding tips

 
  • Don't rush (slow down)
  • Whiteboard: don't worry about syntax! Just make it clear
  • Naive code is better than no code
  • There's gonna be errors, it's expected
  • Run your code frequently
  • Use a REPL to experiment (if possible)
  • There's always a for loop :)

Be aware

 

- The biggest enemy is fear (vicious cycle, self-fulfilling prophecies)

- So don't worry

- Don't worry that you worry

- Don't worry that you worry that you worry

- Imposter syndrome might kick in

Focus on the company, not yourself

Questions?

The training

Prepare a technical interview!

1) General question(s) - 5 min

2) Short specific question(s) - 5min

 

3) Algorithm exercise - whiteboard or paper - 10min

 

The training

Do interviews within teams:

  • Imagine you want to hire a new team member
  • 1 interviewer
  • 1 interviewee
  • Rest of the team take notes (feedback)
  • Everyone should be at least once interviewer and interveiwee
  • If extra time: interview a mentor (and vice versa)
 

Technical Interviews

By Martin Malinda

Technical Interviews

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