- intro (read script below)
- Tell me a story about the last time you taught someone something at work. what was the process like? what went well / what was challenging? (This is a warmup softball question. The candidate will be prepared for something like this, and will relax while answering it.)
- Tell me a story about the last thing someone taught you at work. (Looking for: ability to learn, learning strategies.)
- Substitute for #2 for more senior candidates: How do you deal with stress? (Looking for: any thoughtful approach at all.)
- What’s the hard part of [your job]? (Look for reasons why it's hard; what the candidate is doing to learn more about making it easy. Is it technical or do they have the awareness to talk about people things?)
- Tell me a story about a time modularity (or encapsulation) worked out for you. how do you pick where to encapsulate? what’s good about modularity? what’s difficult? (This is the single most important question for gauging where a candidate is on their programming journey, so leave time for this and dig into the answers.)
- What do you value in a coworker? (ask them to BLURT, and ask this in the final minutes of the interview to add time pressure)
Hi, I’m CJ, I’m architect on the product engineering team, and I am technical lead of Eaze’s platform and infra teams. We’re responsible for the backend services that power Eaze, as well as the infrastructure that keeps them observable and maintainable. I’m planning on asking 5-6 questions, time permitting. I’m reading from a script here, just so you know, and I ask all candidates the same questions as best I can.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that interviewing is stressful, so I’ll do my best to not make it worse. I’m here to figure out what you’re interested in and what you’re great at. I’m looking for ways you’d make our team better. I won’t ask questions to trip you up. I also don’t ask coding questions.
I also want to acknowledge that this interview goes both ways: you’re trying to decide if I’d make a good colleague and if this would be a good place to work. I’ll leave five to ten minutes at the end to turn this around so you can ask me questions.
Q1: I have your resume in front of me. Take five minutes, and walk me through your career and tell me what matters most about it to us here in this interview. [[ Look for how many of the cues here the candidate picks up. Time? Relevance? ]]
Q2: Explain a technical topic to me. It doesn’t have to be about programming specifically. Assume I have a base understanding of software engineering. Try to pick something you feel comfortable diving deep into, or something you’re very excited about. [[ Look for how well the candidate talks about a topic and how well-organized they are about their explanations. Also try to find their enthusiasms and what interests them. Lean into this! ]]
Q3: You encounter a large, legacy codebase. Everyone who worked on it has since left the company. You are tasked with improving the system the codebase supports in whatever way is required. How do you approach this? What questions do you ask? [[ This tells me about how the candidate approaches problem-solving. It's also super-relevant to the jobs I'm interviewing for right now. ]]
Q4: If you encountered a technical topic you did not know well, but suspected would be useful, how do you go about learning it?
Q5: What do you want to learn next in your career? What do you hope to get from your next job? [[ Use this to dig into deeper topics if time permits. ]]
[[ Turn it around and give the candidate a chance to ask questions. ]]