- Activities: what questions do you have about the activities that a software developer does on a daily basis?
What is it like going to work at a company that has an established giant code base?
- Environment: what questions do you have about the overall environment and culture of this workplace?
What text editor do you use? What tools do you use the most on a daily basis?
- Interactions: what questions do you have about the team at this company? What do you hope to see in your interactions during the shadow?
How often do you reach out for help, and how often do you collaborate on projects?
- Objects: what questions do you have about the code or the product?
Did you know the primary language used before you started? Do you like the language that you work with?
- Users: what questions do you have about how the company interacts with their users?
Do you work with the customer service team to hear what complaints the users have and what they find confusing?
- Activities: what was engaging to the person/people you shadowed?
It was interesting to see how similar their workflows seemed to ours at Turing.
- Environment: what did you notice about how they talked about the culture and environment of this company?
They felt like the company listened to them and gave them a good amount of autonomy.
- Interactions: what did you notice about your interactions with this person/people?
Daniel was very excited to explain what he did and was happy to answer any question we had regardless of the complexity.
- Objects: what did you learn about their approach to code and/or product development?
It was a very similar process to what we have been taught at Turing.
- Users: what did you learn about their approach to their users?
Their users seemed to also be developers, so it seemed like there was a certain ease of not having to make things simple for the end user.
- What are your main takeaways from the shadow? How will you use this information to help you with your job search strategy? My main takeaways were to try hosting a project on AWS instead of Heroku, learn some GraphQL, and look into the basics of a few other languages.
- Pick a successful project and write about it with the STAR method (What was the situation/scenario of the project?
- What was the task/target of the project? What action steps did you take? What were the results?):
- Write about a time you failed and what you learned from that experience:
- Write about how you’ve approached working with a team using a specific example:
- What other stories will you prepare to share?
- Do some research into your top companies’ tech stacks; what do you already know? What can you compare to your own learning? What do you need to learn more about?
- Using this interview prep resource doc, pick out at least 3 resources you will use to prepare for interviews as well as 3 behavioral questions you could practice: