How To Prepare For Software Engineering Internship Interview

Aim For Continuous Improvement

Dont forget that interviewing, like anything else, is a skill and gets better with experience. Dont worry about failures, focus on what you learned and do better next time. When you gain some experience, it will become less stressful and thus easier to succeed. Its a process of continuous improvement, you should be getting better and better every time you interview, so keep preparing and keep sharpening your technical and communication skills. Proper research for information is key to your good preparation review sites, Quora or even just Google are good resources for common software engineer interview questions for companies.

A little focused preparation goes a long way, but dont overdo it

All this information might be overwhelming, but you are not going to be asked all of these questions in every interview. I tried to capture the different things Ive seen so far to give you some areas to explore. A little focused preparation goes a long way, but dont overdo it. Its easy to overthink an interview and tie yourself in knots. Good luck, go out there and be awesome! 🙂

Do you have any other tips that you use when preparing? Share with us in the comments!

Why Do You Want To Go Into Software Engineering

Talk about what interests you in the field! For example, why are you passionate about software engineering is it because of a project youve worked on, technology that fascinated you, or because you love problem-solving? Try to keep your answer personal rather than generic, and pull in any relevant experience or learnings that have motivated your search for a job in software engineering.

Understand The Structure Of The Expected Answer

Your first goal should be to understand what the system design interview is about, i.e. what types of questions are asked, how to structure your answer and how deep you should go in your answer.

• Read the section How to approach a system design interview question from the System Design Primer
• Read the course materials from Hired In Tech to get another view about the sample structure
• Start with this example from Practice Coding Interview to a see a full answer

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Try Out Mock Coding Interviews

Coding right in front of your interviewer can be a nerve-wracking experience especially if you have never done it before – which is why getting hands-on experience is so important.

interviewing.io is currently the best mock technical interview resource in the market currently. It allows you to book mock coding interviews with real Google and Facebook engineers, albeit anonymously. You could even book interviews for specific roles like Mobile, Front End, Engineering Management. Even better – if you want to have an easier transition into real world coding interview – you could view recorded interviews and see what phone interviews are like.

Moreover, if you were to do well on your mock interviews, you will be able to unlock the “jobs page” which allows you to book interviews directly with top companies like Uber, Lyft, Quora, Asana and more. I’ve used interviewing.io both as an interviewer and an interviewee and found the experience to be excellent.

The Second Oa Coding And Workstyles Assessment

The hardest OA in my opinion. It has 2 sections.

The first section is Coding.

Time: 70 minutes

Questions: 2

Languages allowed- Java, Python, C++, C, C#

One of the two questions will be easy and the other one can be medium or hard.

Tips:

• Amazon has a huge tendency to repeat questions in their second OA, so if you do company-specific prep, youll find a ton of questions found online are asked to you. So even if you are someone who grinds competitive coding and doesn’t believe in company-specific prepping, I would surely recommend checking out Leetcode Amazon tagged questions or the questions here a week-ish before your 2nd round because there is a huge possibility that youll be asked one of these.
• The usual tip, regular practice on Leetcode, Hackerrank, or any of the other interview prep websites should help you crack this round. Heres the plan I personally followed to get better at cracking coding interviews.
• Add comments to your code, especially if you do not pass all test cases. Amazon has real people reading and reviewing your code, and if you have a couple of failed edge cases, or if you have a solution very close to an optimal solution and not passing a few test cases because of lack of time, you might clear the round regardless, if your comments show that you knew how to solve it.
• Adding to the above point, making the code neat and readable is also important, so use good variable names, etc. for brownie points.

The second section is Workstyles Assessment.

Untimed.

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Maximize Your Chances Of Being Shortlisted

Do you still have trouble getting shortlisted at some or all of the top tech companies? Your resume could be the issue.

Your resume is the single most important entry point to getting shortlisted in major tech companies like FAANG / MANGA. After getting shortlisted, your past achievements become markedly less important as compared to your coding interview skills – which as we know, can be methodically learnt. Being able to frame your past achievements well enough to get through the screening stage is hence very important.

Unfortunately, even the most qualified candidates I know personally don’t know how to write a good resume and fail to get shortlisted. The truth is that when many of us don’t get shortlisted at top tech companies like FAANG / MANGA, we tend to think that we were under-qualified – but in most cases, it’s probably just the lack of good framing.

If you want to learn how to write a good software engineer resume, I’ve written a step-by-step guide here on software engineering resume preparation for companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, with examples for your reference as well.

Software Engineering Internship Questions About Experience And Background

Software engineering professionals often have previous education, job experiences or industry certifications that qualify them for their roles. As an intern, you may be in the process of earning a degree or looking to expand your professional experiences after earning your degree. Therefore, hiring managers understand that you have limited professional work experience and typically focus on your education and other related topics in the questioning. Here are 10 examples:

• What made you want to pursue a career in software engineering?

• Can you tell me more about your college major? what types of courses have you taken that relate to software engineering?

• Have you completed software engineering internships in the past?

• What software engineering project are you most proud of? Can you tell me more about the creation process?

• What examples can you provide from your previous experiences that demonstrate your ability to test and debug software?

• Have you ever had to complete a group programming project? What was the experience, like and how did you work as a team?

• What programming languages have you used to create a website, versus a mobile application?

• Do you have experience referencing coding libraries to complete updates on software systems? If so, what is your process like?

• Have you ever needed to organize CSS files? If so, what’s one or more methods you’ve used to do this?

• What examples can you provide that demonstrate your ability to overcome programming challenges?

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What Aspect Of Our Company Product Or Team Interests You Most

Retention is a high priority for many employers. Replacing a team member can be quite expensive in cost terms of recruitment and training time. Asking questions to ensure your interests and motivations align with that of the company can reduce the risk of losing you as a team member. Though youre ideally excited by the mission of the company, it is not uncommon for companies to use niche technology specifically to attract higher-quality talent. To answer this question, incorporate details from your research that speak specifically to the companys values, past projects or a responsibility mentioned in the job description that aligns with your career motivations and progression.

Example:”I was watching an interview with your CEO about your product that aims to disrupt the lending industry. Streamlining arduous tasks like loan applications has huge potential. I think the growth in this sector over the last year is a big indication of things to come. Additionally, Im excited by the untapped potential of blockchain technology you have recently decided to incorporate. I see this as giving your company the competitive advantage in this space as the verifiable auditability will reduce compliance costs.”

A Little Bit About Myself

I started applying for summer internships around October 2017. I was confident from the start about possible interview calls with favorable outcomes before the fall semester concludes leading to a fun-filled winter break.

But the reality was that I didnt get a single reply for any of my applications because of the insane competition for these summer internships. A significant chunk of the available intern positions in most companies are filled by the undergrads. Also, most companies are finicky about the universities at which the students they pick are studying.

The lack of interview calls for my applications initially scared me a bit, but with a little bit of research, I found out that almost 99% of the calls would be during the spring semester. So all those who didnt get an interview chance before Winter break, BELIEVE ME, you will get a good number of calls after your Winter break.

But I was hopeful. This was Mistake #1: I missed applying to some of the good companies at the start of the Fall. This rule applies to all the companies but especially to well-known companies like Google, Microsoft, Bloomberg, and others.

Tip: Some of the big companies end their recruitment for Summer interns by November, so apply asap when their hiring process starts in August.

Tip: You never prepare for coding interviews in a week or two before your interview, you have to code every day even if your schedule doesnt align that way.

Mark Manson

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Dive Deeper Into The Building Blocks Required To Answer These Questions

After going through a few of the above examples, you have probably heard lots of new terms and technologies that you are not so familiar with. In order to be able to answer these types of questions you will need to dive deeper into a lot of different technologies.

My suggestion is to start with the following videos that provide an overview about how to design scaleable systems.

• Building Dynamic Websites Harvard CS75 by David Malan. The linked video is from lecture 9, which summarizes the whole class, but if you want to dive deeper into specific areas, you can also view the rest of the videos in the class

• Gaurev Senâs YouTube Tutorials
• Grokking the System Design Interview . This is a good list of topics that you need to know

Finally, if have enough time and really want to dive deep into system design, then you can read about more advanced concepts at the following resources:

• The High Scalability blog has a series of posts titled Real Life Architectures that explain how some popular websites were architected
• The book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Klepmann is the best book regarding system design
• The explains how Amazon has built their own architecture
• If you really really want to dive deeper into how existing systems are built, you can also read the published papers on GFS, Dynamo, Haystack, Cassandra, Bigtable, Raft, Paxos, Chubby, Zookeeper, Spanner, Haystack, Kafka, Azure Storage, , Memcache

Software Engineering Internship Interview Questions

The Indeed Editorial Team comprises a diverse and talented team of writers, researchers and subject matter experts equipped with Indeed’s data and insights to deliver useful tips to help guide your career journey.

Related: How to Find an Internship: Determine Your Interests

In this video, Jenn explains how to find an internship, the top 5 ways to land the job, AND some great advice on what NOT to do.

When looking for ways to advance your knowledge and professional development in software engineering, an internship is a great way to gain experience and make industry connections. By researching typical software engineering internship interview questions, you can better prepare yourself to answer questions and present yourself as a qualified candidate to an employer.

In this article, we review general interview questions, questions about experience and background and in-depth interview questions that hiring managers may ask candidates during an interview for a software engineering internship. We also provide additional questions with sample answers and list a few common types of internship interviews to help you prepare.

Related:What Is Software Engineering?

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Talk About A Project You Completed Successfully

Interviewers ask this question to understand your workflow and what youve worked on before. You probably wont need to focus on the technical details here. Instead, summarize the projects purpose, how you approached it including who you worked with, how you managed time, etc. and what the outcome was.

What Types Of Questions Are Asked At An Internship Interview

Although it seems like there are a wide variety of questions you need to be prepared to answer, internship interviews will likely consist of questions about your skills, education, and experience.

In an interview with The Balance, career coach EB Sanders noted that although internship interview questions can be broad, they usually are very typical interview questions. In other words, if you prepare, you shouldnt worry about having too many hardball questions thrown your way.

Preparation is the key to a successful interview and can help steady your nerves. Students can best prepare by researching the company and its employees, Sanders said. If there is a way for you to connect with an employee or previous intern, all the better. But at the very least, run through some expected questions and have an idea of how you would answer.

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Which Programming Language Should I Use

Before you start preparing for the other steps of the interview process, it would be prudent to have a good idea of which programming language you will use during the interview.

When it comes to this question, I have some pretty simple advice: embrace what you are comfortable with, and stick to what you know.

It is fairly common to want to use multiple languages in our field. But, when preparing for an interview, it is best to stick with just one.

This will help shift your focus from worrying about which language you will use, to thinking of problems you have solved with the language you are most comfortable with.

Once you know which programming language you will use, you are ready to take on the challenge of the technical phone interview.

Software Engineer Interview Questions About Experience And Background

In addition to the general questions, a hiring manager could ask, you will likely also need to answer questions about your background and experience in the software engineering industry. These questions will allow you to elaborate more on the skills you have gained through your education and work experience.

• Describe your process for completing a project from start to finish.

• What scaling issues have you had to deal with on past projects? How could it have been avoided and how did you solve it?

• Tell me about a time that you had to collaborate with other people on your team or other teams to solve a complicated problem.

• Describe the process your team currently implements for completing projects. What works well? What would you change and why?

• Which project management tools do you feel are most useful in your role as a software engineer?

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What Is The On

The final stage of the interview process is usually referred to as the on-site. This is often the most in-depth and the most important to perform well at.

One of the main questions the company would like to have a good answer for is, how does this person work? The answer to this question is usually echoed through multiple levels as well, personal, technical, and professional.

Companies seek this answer by giving the candidate various exercises, technical and interpersonal, to gauge your skills and how well you will fit in at their company.

Depending on the company this interview can include various elements, but a few that are most common are:

• Pair programming

You Have A 100 Coins Laying Flat On A Table Each With A Head Side And A Tail Side 10 Of Them Are Heads Up 90 Are Tails Up You Can’t Feel See Or In Any Other Way Find Out Which Side Is Up Split The Coins Into Two Piles Such That There Are The Same Number Of Heads In Each Pile

Split into two piles, one with 90 coins and the other with 10. Flip over every coin in the pile with 10 coins.Less

Pick 10 coins from the original 100 and put them in a separate pile. Then flip those 10 coins over. The two piles are now guaranteed to have the same number of heads. For a general solution of N heads and a total of M coins:1.) Pick any N coins out of the original group and form a second pile.2.) Flip the new pile of N coins over. Done.Example :Original group is HHTTTT . Pick any two of these and flip them over. There are only three possible scenarios:1: The two coins you picked are both tails. New groups are and when you flip the 2nd group you have and . 2.) The two coins you picked consist of one head and one tail. New groups are and and when you flip the 2nd group you have and .3.) The two coins you picked are both heads. New groups are and and when you flip the 2nd group you have and .Less

1. calculate the sum of elements in array say SUM2. sum of numbers 1 to 100 is)/2 = 5050 when n==1003. missing element is Less

Read the question. Here are the steps to solve it:1) find the sum of integers 1 to 1002) subtract the sum of the 99 members of your set3) the result is your missing element!Very satisfying!Less

A callback function is a piece of JavaScript code that executes after the main function that the callback is attached to executes successfully.Less

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