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

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)