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@f1337
Last active August 20, 2020 16:11
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Example Programming/Tech Interview Questions

These are my favorite interview questions. They don’t include coding problems, at all. You can learn that stuff better from interviewcake.com than from me anyway. 🙂

Tell me about a particularly difficult problem you solved recently – technical or not. Give me the gory details.

^ I ask a lot of probing questions based on the answer.

What accomplishment in your career or life are you most proud of? Tell me about a professional mistake you made recently, one with consequences, and how you resolved it.

^ I’m most interested in the topics chosen for both of these. I am way more impressed with answers that involve social consequences. It indicates a lack of empathy to me when the answer is 100% technical. But some interviewers are more interested in the technical answers. You have to ask yourself both what are they looking for, and what kind of place you want to work? I always give the more human-centered answers to these questions, which IME weeds out asshole employers as well as the questions weed out asshole employees when I’m the one asking.

The following is a question I only ask for leadership roles:

How do you handle leading a team member who does not want to play by the rules?

^ I’m looking for folks who are all-carrot, no-stick. Again, I’ve found answering this myself with all-carrot has weeded out awful potential employers.

Back to general technical interview questions:

Do you have any code you’ve written which you could share with me, and walk me through the design & reasoning?

^ This is not a deal-breaker if not. The past N years my work has been closed-source, protected by NDAs, and I’ve had to carve out time to write stuff to share for interviews. It’s exhausting and not everyone has the time.

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f1337 commented Aug 19, 2020

From my friend and former colleague @bcelenza:

Biggest thing I’ve learned interviewing at AWS for 4 years is the effectiveness of the STAR method: https://www.themuse.com/advice/star-interview-method
And really focusing on the individual role and contributions of the interviewee. A lot of candidates will fall back to “we” when describing what was done, it becomes unclear what the candidate actually brings to the situation.

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f1337 commented Aug 19, 2020

Another from @ph0rque:

For general culture / "good human" questions, I like the WHO book method (but I do it much more informally): https://whothebook.com/
Basically, starting at their latest job and working backwards, I ask a few probing questions about not just what they did, but how it was working with their team, their boss, any direct reports, etc. The purpose is to get a picture if they were actually as good as they claimed they were, and if they are a**holes or pleasant people to work with.

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