Interviewing is an exercise of story telling, hopefully the stories you tell are true. Not everyone is born with the gift of story telling but it is something that can be practiced and improved. After going through interviews during Q1 of this year here are some interview questions that came up frequently. I found it easier to answer these questions if stories of past experiences were reviewed before hand. Practice answering each of them and you’ll have a leg up in your next set of interviews.
What project are you most proud of?
The idea is that this should be a relatively easy question that can reveal a lot about a candidate and how they talk about something they are proud of. It’s a chance for them to highlight some of their best work, and you can get an idea of what excites them.
Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a team mate or coworker.
There’s two main portions that can get highlighted with this question.
1. How you handle conflict and act.
2. How do you resolve conflict or are you able to resolve conflict
Try not to sound super negative while answering questions even if they weren’t from the best times. It’s best to show that you can work through and resolve conflicts. Prepare one or two stories where this has happened to you and use the one that you feel is more applicable to the company you are interviewing for.
Tell me about a time when you brought down production.
If you’ve been in industry long enough this has happened. It’s a great time to go over how you handle stressful situations, what you learn from things going side ways and how you reason through problems. I’d prep for it with this breakdown:
1. Highlight what system was effected to give context
2. Go over what broke and the size of the impact.
3. Cover how you found out that production was broken, was there any observability tooling or alerts in place?
4. How did you bring production back up?
5. Post Incident Review, did you have one or what was the process like?
6. Did you learn anything new and what did you do to make sure that production did not go down again in the same way?
This is one of my favorite questions to ask candidates when I am on the opposite side of the table. It’s a good chance to see how they debug and think through things breaking. It can also give a feel for their experience with on-call rotations.
Fun fact during the last interview where I was asked this I froze up. It was probably do to not getting the greatest sleep with a newborn but I felt like a noob. I still passed that interview round though.
What was the most impactful project you worked on or led?
This is similar to the what project are you most proud about but it highlights a different area. Generally this is more important for senior folks as it gives an idea of if you can look beyond pure engineering and know why the work you were doing effected the business. Highlight the benefit of the work that was done. Did you save the company money, create a new product that broadened the TAM you had access to or did it make the eng team more efficient? Show that you know why you are doing work..
How do you go about learning new concepts?
Each company you work at is different. There’s a high chance that wherever you end up next or if you help out another team you’ll be exposed to something new to work with. Having an approach to learning new things will help you out tremendously. Being able to talk about your learning style too helps bring trust as well from your interviewer who might be one of your new team mates.
How do you explain technical concepts to non technical people?
This is a good place to show how you can talk with stakeholders. How do you glue together what you are doing on the eng side at a high level with what matters in the eyes of the stakeholders? It is helpful to put together a concrete example that you can walk through.
Practice questions like these for you interviews. See if you can get some time with an old coworker or manager to go over some of them. If you have access to any of the new LLMs see if you can use voice to text to get your responses to these questions and then ask the chat if there is anything you can improve with your answers. Best of luck in the job search whether it is going on right now or if you are prepping for the future. The future comes fast so be prepared.
After CompSci 
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