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?
- General topics:
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
- In an editor (10 - 30 min)
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
- 674