PREPARE FOR A INTERVIEW SOFTWARE ENGINEER HOW

What.Interview prep is an essential part of the job-search process. Someone told you that youвЂ™re not good enough to get a job at Microsoft or Facebook.What makes this position a good fit for you at this point in your career Tell us how your experience and training have prepared you for this position. It was a bit difficult at first because of the group setting, as you had to compete a bit either other applicants to speak (people are AGRESSIVE).This is for those of you out there who are about to start your job search and who may be worried that you canвЂ™t land a top-tier tech job without a Stanford CS degree. The interview was fairly casual and focused on our personal connection to MAC (lots of 'why MAC' questions) and our approach to customer service/selling product.

You shouldnt memorize whats on the sheet or check it off during the interview.Acing a job interview has as much to do with the way you prepare as it does your. Creating a cheat sheet will help you feel more prepared and confident. Its a checklist to make sure you stay focused before, during, and after the interview.

Prepare For A Interview Software Engineer How

I went to a community college in Idaho for two years, and then finished my CS degree at a small Catholic university.I started learning computer science in my junior year of college, because it sounded fun to me at the time. Subscribe here for more article updates from meIf you prefer to watch my story instead, I made a video here: BackgroundI did not graduate from an Ivy league school. How I landed multiple offers as a full-time software engineer How I landed interviews with top tech companies in the world: Facebook Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and others. HereвЂ™s how I landed my dream job at Twitter.Read more about my courses here to learn how I prepared.You can read about my experiences after a year at Twitter here.

I headed into these interviews thinking that the interviewer would ask me what a linked list or binary tree was.I didnвЂ™t pass any of those interviews. I applied to as many big tech companies as I could, and had the good fortune of landing a few phone interviews.At this point, I didnвЂ™t have a single notion of what a technical screen would be like, much less how to prepare for it. Even then, it would break every time I put a cartridge in it.To support myself through college, I took multiple part-time jobs like cleaning floors and working stand-up concessions.When I graduated, I didnвЂ™t have a job lined up.

These were mostly offshore companies that were looking to pitch their company to the US market.One of my workarounds was that I crafted emails that used keywords from their listings in the title of my emails. I filtered the results by how specific and recent they were, and kept improving it by adding more and more features.As it turned out, there were a few bots in the market already that crawled Craigslist and sent out automated emails. It wasnвЂ™t perfect, but it worked well enough.In the end I collected about 500 emails from around San Francisco, Portland, Spokane, and Seattle.

I grew a lot during this period. The startup was located in Kirkland at the time, so I had to take a 45-min bus ride to make it in time for the interview.I then stayed there for the next 3.5 years, where I learned a great deal of stuff like Amazon AWS, EC2, DynamoDB, SQS, and Docker. I was optimizing for results rather than reach at that point.As luck would have it, I finally landed a job at a startup in Seattle as a junior software engineer. I stopped at 500 because I was short on time and needed to finalize a job as soon as possible. I did a quick A/B test, and the replies I received had increased quite a bit from around 2вЂ“3% to 10%.Out of the 500 or so emails, I received about 50 replies, and landed phone screens with a small percentage of those.

I believe this made a huge impact in my career. I absorbed anything and everything they threw at me. And I learned how to handle people problems.I was working next to a group of smart people who held jobs at Microsoft, Amazon, and LinkedIn, and I tried to be the вЂњspongeвЂќ in the group. I learned how to reason about software design.

That was the start of the SOA phase for the startup. But it was a great opportunity to understand the codebase and get some code reviews.A year into it, I started owning parts of the codebase, and then I was tasked with turning a set of features into a service. I started out writing some functions to add/modify a feature that were mostly small in scope.

How I prepared for my interviewsAfter suffering through my first job search, I told myself that I must be prepared in future interviews.I started preparing for interviews by charting out an overview of what I was good at, bad at, and where I could improve. I grew the most during these 2вЂ“3 years, both as an individual and software engineer. Each step of the process revealed more things I needed to learn. I started to learn feature scoping, negotiations, monitoring, alerting, and documentation. Rather, I needed to get that set of features done and there were the bottlenecks.There were many times where I was stuck in analysis paralysisвЂЉвЂ”вЂЉa state where I over-analyzed scenarios and ended up not able to make progress.Those trying times were the greatest learning opportunities.

In a 45-minute interview, you want to use most of your time solving the actual problem.Pro tip: pick a language thatвЂ™s less verbose so that you can write the code more quickly on the whiteboard. HereвЂ™s a trivial comparison between C++ and Python.A C++ program to sort in descending order: #include Compare that with PythonвЂ™s version: a = IвЂ™ve received feedback from interviewers to err on the side of brevity in an interview. I prefer Python 2.x, but you can go for either 2.x or 3.Also, another reason why I picked Python is that itвЂ™s highly readable and easy to write on a whiteboard. I learned Python by going through YouTube tutorials like these, and also reading their documentation. It is a great language to learn, easy to pick up, supports many data structures out of the box, and can be written quickly on the whiteboard.

Feature scoping enabled me to build a very solid API because I know these scenarios well.I then drew some pictures of a high-level design, of how the client would interact with the backend, and of how the backend would store the data.I started small, and then added more components where needed and proactively sought where the bottlenecks were. And because I have some iOS programming experience from my side-projects, I could talk a little bit about callbacks and push/long-polls here.I started the conversation with some features IвЂ™d like to have on my own version of Instagram: likes, upload a photo, and a simple timeline. For example, how would you build Instagram from scratch? (I was asked this at Facebook.)My background is in API designs and service-oriented architecture, so I took this opportunity to show how I would design my own version of Instagram. I spent another week going through some design challenges like вЂњdesign XвЂќ and went as wide and deep as I could.This was a lot of fun for me, because I often looked at iOS apps and tried to figure out how they did it.

Prepare For A Mac Interview