How To Interview Software Engineers

Top Interview Questions To Ask Software Engineers

Hiring a software engineer is a process that should be approached carefully and with deliberation. A good software engineer will help your company grow, but one that does not have the right skills or a good work ethic can slow down and hinder your growth.

Therefore, you should know the best questions to ask during the hiring process to successfully recruit software engineers.

These 17 interview questions for software engineers are some of the top questions you should ask potential software engineering candidates that youre interviewing.

Mindtree Interview Experience For Software Engineer

Practice What You’re Learning

Out of all the things I mention in this post, this one should come as the least surprising.

To get better at coding, problem-solving, interviewing, or underwater basket weaving, you have to practice. A LOT. There is no getting around this step.

I, like many, have fallen victim to a cycle of planning too much, taking too many tutorials, or telling myself Ill start tomorrow.

For me, this was, and still is the hardest part about preparing for interviews, or quite honestly just being in this industry in general. Things move really quickly, and no one wants to feel like they are falling behind.

But, tech is a mentally draining profession. It is more than understandable that the thought of practicing coding interview questions in any capacity is exhausting.

I have some good news, though. When you think about practicing, try to think of your current skills as water in a bucket. Each time you practice, even something you think is small or not enough, think of that as drops of water that fill your bucket.

All experiences, good or bad, frustrating or rewarding, fill this bucket up and make you a stronger developer every day.

I think a great way to get into the habit of practicing writing code is to give yourself a goal per week. Remember, the ultimate goal is to practice and stay consistent, so avoid setting the bar at an unrealistic level for yourself. All this will do is make you feel bad on days you just dont feel like coding.

• Code Academy

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Where Do You See Your Career Going In The Future

There’s no right or wrong answer to this question. Recruiters will typically ask this to know more about you. They may also be trying to figure out how you fit in with the company. If, for example, you’re looking to move up in management, but the company doesn’t provide opportunities to do so, the recruiter will want to know this before hiring you.

Example: “I’d like to move up in the company. I saw in the job posting that there are opportunities for career advancement here, and I definitely see myself taking on more responsibility as time goes on.”

Tell Me About A Time You Were New To A Situation Or Environment How Did You Adapt

This question allows you to show your ability to take on responsibilities that are not included in your job description, such as independent research and how you adapt to dynamic work environments. If you are unsure how to answer this question, consider describing your experience starting your previous job.

Example:”When I started my last job, I had never worked as a full-time software engineer and knew that I had a lot to learn. However, I made sure to ask many questions and take notes about what I learned, reviewing them at the end of each workday. Eventually, I became familiar with the systems and protocol and exceeded my goals within the first six months of employment.”

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How To Interview Software Developers: Valuable Tactics

Giving any companys programming interview experience an overhaul is a matter of careful analysis and intelligent determination. The hiring managers job is to objectively choose the best candidate for the software engineering position. This sounds simple but requires them to be knowledgeable and perceptive. They should choose from a wide pool, and utilize the expertise of other programmers within the company.

Have you experienced great or horrible software engineering interviews? Here are tips on how to conduct an interview that gets you the insights you need to make sound hiring decisions. Happy hiring!

Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions

Senior software engineers oversee various development projects and lead teams in realizing company goals. Because of their senior positions, they often manage the needs and approaches to product development for their organizations. If you’re getting ready to interview for a senior role in software engineering, it’s important to prepare in advance for questions that showcase your technical and leadership capabilities. In this article, we cover 40 senior software engineer interview questions with several example answers to help you get ready and succeed in your interview.

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Software Engineering Interviewsthe Backblaze Way

April 21, 2020by Ramya Ramamoorthy//

Software engineering interviews are carried out differently across every tech company, andunsurprisinglytheir merits are hotly debated and often ridiculed. At Backblaze, we have our own way of hiring software engineers, which we like to think is pretty fair. In fact, because we value transparency, we wanted to take some time on the blog to share exactly what our interview process looks like, along with some tips and tricks for any of you software engineers out there who might be interested in acing the interview .

Whether youre looking for a new gig, or youre just curious about how software engineers share what theyre capable of, we hope you enjoy the window into our hiring process.

Interviewing During COVID-19:

Interview Questions To Ask Software Developers And Programmers

Looking for the right software engineer? Dont be overwhelmed by the interview process. The talent experts at Roevin have compiled a list of carefully crafted questions to ask a software developer so you can identify top talent and help your company grow.

Good hires are key to building strong teams. This is especially true in software development where change happens fast and you need people who can adapt quickly and still do great work. Interviewing candidates for software development or software engineering roles can be a unique experience. Youre often looking for a very specific set of practical skills and need to see how a candidate approaches challenges or tasks. This means that interviews can often take the form of a practical exam with candidates often going through more than one interview/exam phase before ultimately being hired .

The reasoning is simple: a candidate can have all the right credentials and certifications on paper but struggle to apply all that learning to real world scenarios. Likewise, a candidate can look mediocre on paper, but when you see them in action, you realize that their ability to adapt, learn and strategize through a challenge is truly an asset.

Of course, entry level software engineer interview questions, senior developer interview questions and everything in between will vary as well, so its best to design your interview tests around both the work type and the role level.

Fastidious in their work

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Providing A Positive Candidate Experience

A big part of the interviewer training that all our interviewers go through is how to provide a positive candidate experience: We want to provide every candidate with a great experience, and hope to leave a lasting positive impression of our company and interview process â regardless of whether we make them an offer or not. All our trusted interviewers play an important role in providing this experience to our candidates. Interviewing is highly stressful, and some companies put candidates through trials and tests that only makes it worse. . We want to be an example of how things can be better. While an interviewer may be speaking with a lot of people, for many applicants this is their only time speaking with us, and we all want to leave a positive impression.

Specifically, we ask our interviewers the following:

• Always be prepared and always show up on time
• If youâre not sure about how to pronounce the candidateâs name, ask .
• Listen well, donât interrupt. Remember that this is about giving them a chance to share how awesome they are keep the conversation focused on the candidate and their experiences.
• Connecting with candidates can be difficult remotely, and the remoteness can exacerbate differences in personalities. Please be aware that just because youâre not âclickingâ with a candidate during your conversation with them, this doesnât mean theyâre not qualified.
• In case of technical difficulties or other issues, be patient.

How Is Your Team Structured And How Does My Role Fit Within That Structure

Gaining a high-level view of the organization’s structure will help you envision the impact of what you create and the processes and people involved along the way. It also shows the interviewer that you’re not merely concerned with what’s on your computer screen you respect and value the infrastructure of the organization’s process.

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Top Tips To Prepare For Software Engineering Interviews

How to crack your next coding interview? Is it worth joining a bootcamp? Which platform is best for coding interview? Read top tips to crack coding interview

For example, I implemented 3 core features to help us with our goal of getting more views. At a high level, I worked with the design team on a revamped landing page, developed a more efficient and innovative social media sharing, and highlighted referrals clearly. With these features, we reached 100,000 views in a week! I can share more details with you about each of these tasks if youd like.

• Start by researching the company
• Practice for both technical and behavioral interviews
• Keep your responses succinct
• Heres what you can do next

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Researching the culture of a company is also crucial. You should talk about the culture and values of an organization during your interview so that recruiters see you as an ideal fit. For example, if you are interviewing at Facebook, start with their company page to learn more about their mission and history. Next, take a look at the Facebook Life page to understand the companys culture and values, read testimonials from employees, and more. Finally, you can look at the companys Diversity page to learn about their commitment to diversity in the workplace.

Have A Consistent Scoring Mechanism

This is what I like to call the assume-the-candidate-is-exceptional way to score.

• Assume that the candidate will solve the question in the best possible way and give them a 5.
• Throughout the course of the discussion, add negative points for things that matter and the candidate doesn’t do well on.
• For a role requiring a good grip on algorithms, for example, take off -1.5 for only being able to arrive at an unoptimized answer on their second attempt, -1.5 if you had to give a very revealing hint to move forward, -2 if they give up too soon, -0.5 if they miss edge cases and so on.

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Always Treat Complexity Positively

A quote from Gregor Hohpe perfectly explains the problem:

Developers are known to be opinionated and often favor complex solutions that are seen as challenges.

Very rarely is a piece of code so valuable that it needs hardcore resilience built-in because most of us work on web apps and not flight control systems or life support devices. And still, we tend to overcomplicate things, often even without having a single customer upfront or knowing about their actual needs.

When the candidate shares their solutions, either to their past problems or those brought up during the interview, always take context into account and try to see whether they created complexity because it was necessary to bring value to the business, or to boost their own resume.

Last but not least, ask about their work with a variety of different technologies, but don’t expect them to be experts in every single one of them. This way, you will be able to get a feeling for their honesty, integrity, and openness to learning.

What you really want is someone with production experience in every layer of the tech stack: backend/frontend, databases, infrastructure, testing, build automation, monitoring, and documentation. Someone who is honest, open, humble, and always trying their best. Someone you can trust.

If you want to read some thoughts on assessing a candidates leadership skills, check out The Missing Piece In Tech Leadership Interviews.

What To Expect From Interviews For Software Developers

When you’re preparing for a software engineering interview, you should first be familiar with various technical aspects of the position and company. You can find important key points by looking over the job description again. Look for particular terminologies to inform you about the company. If the job description mentions knowledge in C#, you can assume that the client or employer is a Microsoft shop.

You can expect theoretical, behavioural, and technical questions at any interview for software developers. This is because you need to work directly with other disciplines to turn theoretical applications and products into reality. You need to be able to work well in teams and have an understanding of various theoretical and technical concepts.

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What Are The Questions Asked In Software Engineering Interview

7 Questions to Ask in a Software Engineering Interview to Figure Out If It’s the Right Fit

• What Does the Team Look Like?
• What Are Your Expectations for the Person in This Role?
• What’s Your Tech Stack and What Development Tools Do You Use?
• How Are Design Decisions Made? …
• How Are Projects Prioritized and Planned?

Software Development Questions For Project Management

Another key area for software engineers and developers is project management. These interview questions will help you understand how software engineers and developers organize and prioritize tasks for project management.

• What systems do you typically use for managing task lists and projects?
• If you have multiple deadlines, how do you decide which tasks you prioritize in front of others?
• When building a new product/application release, what do you do to ensure the project runs according to plan?
• Tell me about a project that you were a part of that was mismanaged. What would you do differently?
• Agile, Scrum, XP, PRINCE2, Lean. Have you ever worked using any of these project methodologies? Which is your favorite and why?
• What do you think is most important for a project to be a success?

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How Do You Ensure There Are No Bugs In Your Software Or Applications

The aim of this question is to assess the candidate’s analytical skills and ability to prevent or find and fix bugs in their work. What to look for in an answer:

• Established process for finding and fixing bugs
• Strong analytical skills
• Ability to produce error-free work

Example:

“To lower the risk of bugs in my software or applications, I keep my code as simple as possible. Complex code is harder to test, making it more difficult to find bugs. I also split my code into separate files when possible and test each file separately. This again makes the code less complicated and makes it easier to find bugs.”

Book An Interview Meeting Without Clear Expectations

Multiple times, Ive received a calendar invite for a 30min chat, without having any idea about the stage of the process. This can lead to uncomfortable situations and a waste of time when the interviewee expects a friendly get-to-know-each-other and perhaps even call in from their tablet, but instead are greeted with several coding challenges they are expected to solve quickly. Talent can easily be pushed away when doing this.

Instead, in your invites, communicate the purpose and expectations of every interview stage clearly, allowing the candidate to prepare, and join the meeting with a certain level of confidence.

I have to say that this mostly happens when a third-party recruiter is involved.

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Brush Up On The Basics:

• Work through a few practical examples: Try looking at or completing sample coding challenges on sites such as HackerRank, CareerCup or TopCoder.
• Do some reading: Check out samples of books such as Elements of Programming Interviews and Cracking the Coding Interview * Were not affiliated in any way with these authors and please dont feel compelled to purchase either of these books, but they are written by respected members in the tech world who have conducted many Two-Sigma style interviews. These titles may give you a refresher on concepts we cover in our interview sessions.

What Working Hours Are Most Comfortable For You

People choose remote work mostly because of flexible working hours. However, different organizations can have different requirements. Moreover, as your team grows, you may be getting new team members that are located in different time zones.

Therefore, everyone should sync their working hours to get a certain overlap between the time zones to hold meetings, for example. Therefore, you have to find out if the candidate can adjust their schedule to fit the needs of your business.

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