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This installment is going to be the least technically demanding thus far however these questions are a more realistic reflection on what a…
**… Speaking of which … stay tuned till the end of the article or skip down to it for a list of web development companies with reportedly fair hiring practices!**
Software engineer interviewers ask behavioral/cultural questions to evaluate interviewee’s soft skills, and also to decide whether the candidate is a cultural fit. Make sure you’ve prepared great answers to these interview questions.
_âš«_Tell me about yourself
⚫====>“Tell me about yourself” is one of the most common and important interview questions. However, it can be daunting, as it’s one you need to get right. After all, not only is it your first impression on the interviewer, but you also need to be simultaneously professional and authentic when answering it.
_⚫_So how can you give a good answer without oversharing? To help you structure your answer, we’ll give you a rough guideline: start with a short introduction, talk about the present, recount the past, and mention your future goals.
Current Experience
⚫**Outline the role you’re currently in, your responsibilities, and your achievements (without reciting your resume)
⚫**Highlight what you’re most passionate about (i.e. working with PMs to perfect product specs, discussing with colleagues about different tech stacks, helping others excel in their jobs and career)
⚫**Recount one or two job-related projects and/or situations that map onto the job you’re applying to (i.e. collaborating with designers, working with legacy code, implementing best-practices, introducing new tech stacks, mentoring your colleagues)
Now it’s time to highlight your skills a little:
_âš«_Selectively highlight one high-impact (preferably quantifiable) project you were involved with for each job
_âš«_Highlight the hard and soft skills you learned from your past working experiences
_⚫_Emphasize the initiatives you took to improve the company’s work flow (i.e. propose new flow to streamline sprints) or your own skillsets (i.e. engaging in hackathon with colleagues or friends)
_âš«_Convey what you hope to achieve and learn from the new job
_âš«_Detail products, projects, features, or initiatives you can imagine yourself help kick off and lead in the company
_âš«_Tell me what a productive day at work looks like to you
_⚫_This question may not appear in every interview, but when they do, it’s important for you to highlight your organizational and prioritization skills. When hiring managers ask this question, they want to know:
_⚫_Whether you’re a proactive communicator and a good planner of your time
D_escribe one or two instances where you had several projects running simultaneously and how you managed to prioritize different tasks, make progress, meet milestones, and work on iterations based on feedback._
_âš«_How you deliver quality work with limited time
_⚫_When there’s limited time and multiple projects going on, you may not be able to give 100% to the projects at hand. Let the interviewers know:
_âš«_How you decide which tasks should be prioritized
_âš«_How you negotiate deadlines and milestones with stakeholders
_âš«_How you ensure all projects will be delivered with acceptable quality
_⚫_At what milestones you believe it’s ok to deliver something “less than perfect”
_⚫_How you decide when to go back and improve the “minimum viable projects” delivered earlier in the project’s timeline
_⚫_Will you excel in this job? Are you passionate about this job? It’s time to show how. For the first question, highlight some of your professional abilities:
_âš«_Industry experience
_âš«_Technical skills
_âš«_Soft skills
_âš«_Key accomplishments
***âš«1>***Excitement will fuel your performance
***⚫2>***Passion will confirm that you’re interested in this job
_âš«_Eagerness will help you get through challenges at work
_âš«_Company culture and shared values
_⚫_Do you know the company’s culture and will you be a good fit? Here are some culture-related points you could cover in your answer:
_⚫_You’re attracted to the company’s general reputation
_⚫_You’re inspired by a specific leader in the company
_⚫_You’re passionate about the company’s products and services
_⚫_You’re onboard with the company’s initiatives (community engagement, public endorsements, etc.)
_⚫_You admire the company’s culture. Here are some specific examples:
⚫Are you passionate about the company and will you stay committed to this company? If the interviewer already asked you “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” then you don’t have to stress too much about showing your long-term commitment when answering this question. However, if you haven’t had the opportunity to show your commitment to the company, the most organic way to show your commitment is to talk about your long term plans in the company. Here are some things you can talk about:
_âš«_Projects you want to start
_âš«_Potential directions you think the company can go in
_âš«_The different products/teams you want to contribute to
_⚫_Processes you’d like to participate in improving
_⚫_Ultimately, every single question interviewers ask you is related to this overarching question: “Why should we hire you?” Interviewers want to know, as confidently as possible, that you will be a good hire. Therefore, your answer should confirm that you’ll be a good hire.
_⚫_Unlike the more specific questions we’ve outlined above, this question is a generic question that requires a concise but powerful answer. Think about this as your elevator pitch — you should be able to sell yourself to the interview within a matter of minutes.
_⚫_To come up with your elevator pitch, you’ll need to do some planning and consolidation.
_âš«_Here are some guiding questions for you to kickoff your brainstorming sessions:
_⚫_What are the most important qualifications for this position from the company’s perspective?
_âš«_What are my strong suits and how do they set me apart from others?
_âš«_What are my most monumental accomplishments?
_âš«_Why are you the best person for this job?
_âš«_Consolidate and practice your pitch
_âš«_Combine your answers in prose form to make sure each point flows to the next smoothly
_âš«_Check to make sure your answer sets you apart from other candidates
***âš«!!!!!!!***Practice, practice, and practice, but DO NOT TRY TO MEMORIZE YOUR PITCH!!!!!!!!!
Nailing an interview takes more than just knowing how to answer common interview questions. You’ll also need to prepare questions of your own, think about salary, and get your communications right. Here’s how.
⮕As the job seeker, it’s normal to feel like you’re being interrogated during interviews. However, at its core, an interview is a conversation, and should be a two-way interaction. As the interviewee, you need to stay engaged and ask thoughtful questions.
⮕By asking questions, you’re expressing your genuine curiosity towards the company. This helps companies know that you’re serious about them. Additionally, it also helps you evaluate whether the job and/or the company is really what you’re looking for.
⮕There are fantastic resources out there with more than a dozen questions you can ask interviewers. Here, we’ll provide a few that we think are essential to help you gain deeper understandings about the role, company, and your future within the company:
⮕The job and cross-team communication
⮕The company’s values and working culture
⮕What are some shared qualities and characteristics among your employees?
⮕What’s your favorite part about working at the company?
⮕What’s your least favorite part about working at the company?
Professional growth opportunities
⮕Are there multiple product/service teams in the company? Can engineers apply to join a different team? What does the process look like?
⮕Are there professional development courses and training available?
⮕Do senior engineers and engineering leads usually get promoted from within the company?
_âš«_Is there anything unclear or concerning about my background that I can help clarify?
_âš«_What are the next steps in the interview process?
_âš«_Is there anything else I can provide you with that would be helpful?
_âš«_How to answer salary expectations?
⚫“What are you salary expectations?” can be a daunting question. If talking about money wasn’t uncomfortable enough already, most job seekers worry that proposing the “wrong number” would cost them the job — or land them a job offer with a disappointing salary. Not great.
_⚫_Depending on how many rounds of interviews you’ve gone through, you may feel differently about how close you are to getting the job. The closer you get to the end of the hiring process, the more likely it is for you to start feeling anxious due to higher expectations. As a result, you may be eager to follow up with the hiring manager regarding your interview results. With that said, there’s a fine line between showing your eager attitude and coming off as desperate.
_⚫_Before we get to the types of follow up emails you should send out, make sure to ask the hiring manager about when you can expect to hear back from them about next steps. This information will help you decide when it’s appropriate to follow up down the line.
_âš«_There are four types of follow up emails you should send at different times after the interview: Thank you email, checking-in email, second follow up email, final follow up email.
A thank you email should be sent out on the same day of the interview or one day after your interview. The main purpose of this email is to show your excitement and appreciation. This email should be short and sweet and should include:
⮕A brief mention of the specific job you interviewed for
⮕A brief note of what you found most impressive about the company
⮕One or two things you learned about the organization
⮕One sentence about how you’re excited you are to contribute in a specific way
âš«Describe the process you used for a recent project, from requirements to delivery. Does your team prefer using Agile or Waterfall? Any pros and cons?
âš« In answering this question, you need to show your planning, process, and communication/collaboration skills. Think in advance about a suitable project where your contributions cover all these bases.
⚫If you can, it’s best to choose to describe an Agile project you worked on, as organizations whether they use a Waterfall or Agile methodology, are keen to work with developers experienced in Agile.
âš« Ideally, share a project in which you worked with a bigger team.
âš« Outline the components of the project and what role you played.
âš« Highlight any interactions with other teams and the process for handover and collaboration.
âš«Highlight any interactions with other teams and the process for handover and collaboration.
R_emember to keep positive because the interviewers are always looking for constructive answers._
âš«You can specify cutting edge collaboration tools and techniques and/or methodologies that you already know the company employs in their own workflows.
⚫For the least favorite parts, don’t just list the downsides and failures, but also mention what you’ve learned from it and how you would improve.
⚫ Ensure that you come across humbled from the failures, not exasperated and that you know better than everyone else — even if you truly feel this way! Explain how you tried to positively encourage your team to correct the course rather than staying silent and going with a consensus majority.
⚫ Questions like this are designed to allow you to showcase your way of thinking. The interviewer is looking to hear your ability to make choices based on rational decisions — so make sure that you show that you can do this!
To begin with, give an example of a project in which you had the most ownership or you had the greatest sense of achievement/efficiency/effectiveness from the toolchain used.
⚫ Next, describe the goal of the project, and briefly go through your responsibilities when it came to the toolchain decision-making process. Within Agile work practices, it’s usually a team effort to decide the best programming languages/tools/services are the best fit for the project, within customer requirements. Outline the consultation process you went through with both the customer and your team to arrive at the best solutions.
âš«Outline the situation, the goal you expected, and the reason why there was a challenge.
âš«Share the toolchain you used when you encountered the problem, then other technologies and tools you applied to help solve it, if applicable. Ensure to note whether there was a full tool pivot or you managed to build onto an existing library (or something similar) to achieve the end goal.
âš«Remember: the most important thing is not what you ultimately used, but how many options you referred to during the process, and which metrics you adopted to decide which tech to go for. Remember to share the pros and cons of your decision, and if, looking back now, whether you would do it differently.
⚫First of all, the interviewer would like to know the traffic level we’re expecting: 1,000, 100,000, or 10 million users per second? Think about the data expectations for each system user, database connections (blocking/nonblocking actions), downtime specifics, and cloud considerations (if any).
âš«List the potential problems that might occur when trying to scale. Different traffic levels may have different problems, so make sure you think this through, and decide the priorities of the problems that you should solve. Many codebases are not built for scale, so note code changes that might need to occur, rather than just infrastructure expectations.
âš«Different traffic levels may have different system architectures. List the options you think best fit your scenario and explain why you choose them. Many apps utilize a stripped-back product (which can be achieved through system architecture) when high traffic levels affect systems, rather than crashing the product completely or users experiencing unacceptable wait times.
âš«First, do your groundwork to ensure that you thoroughly understand the different testing types. Do you know your unit testing from your regression testing from your user acceptance testing? If you need to brush up, check out this great resource.
⚫Once you’ve got that on lock, it’s time to share a project that you’ve tested thoroughly before.
âš«Remember to separate the project into different sections. Each section should apply the testing type that fits its characteristics. Describe the goals of different testing types, and also introduce the library/service you used for the test. (For bonus points: explain the pros and cons of the library/service and whether it was your decision to choose that particular suite.)
âš«It makes sense at this point to include documentation (and particularly inline documentation) you use that helps clarify functions/issues so that testing goes smoothly.
⚫You may also mention a project you were involved in where testing was not well conducted and how you would — or did — go about fixing the issues.
⚫Time for some details! When answering this question, give an example of a project that you’ve monitored before.
âš«Explain what information you logged and what questions it answered.
âš«Please do not just describe the data format but also give the reason why you decided to extract this data.
âš«Describe the reporting process and any associated tools used.
âš«Some questions to think about to help you structure your answer, and nail your response:
_âš«_Complaining about having to handle the problem
_âš«_Showing how annoyed you were at the problem
_âš«_Pointing fingers at others for the problem
_âš«_Talking ill of your bosses or coworkers
⚫Keep in mind that your interviewer is not only trying to get a glimpse of your past, but to gain an understanding of how you might react to challenges should they hire you. Therefore, when you’re choosing your scenario, try to pick one that may be applicable in your new work setting as well.
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By Bryan Guner on March 21, 2021.
Exported from Medium on August 31, 2021.
