Tech Interview Handbook

Post by MamaJumba » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 9:41 AM UTC

d4mi3n wrote: post #86

bovermyer wrote: post #9

This is... incredibly disconnected from my 15-odd years of experience in my career. Is this how Silicon Valley engineering careers work?

Depends a lot on the companies and positions you’re interviewing for. I work in technical security these days and did very little in the way of actual code quizzes compared to when I was a straight up software engineer. I think it also helps to remember that interviews are two-way. If you see a company with an insane interview process, do you really have confidence in the quality of a team you’d be on when you got to…

> How much of the work I’m doing is driven by planning as opposed to circumstance

What question(s) do you ask the companies to get information for this?

Post by d4mi3n » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 7:04 AM UTC

MamaJumba wrote: post #131

d4mi3n wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends a lot on the companies and positions you’re interviewing for. I work in technical security these days and did very little in the way of actual code quizzes compared to when I was a straight up software engineer. I think it also helps to remember that interviews are two-way. If you see a company with an insane interview process, do you really have confidence in the quality of a team you’d be on when you got to…

> How much of the work I’m doing is driven by planning as opposed to circumstance What question(s) do you ask the companies to get information for this?

I usually ask this question multiple ways with different wording as I go through an interview panel. They're generally along the lines of:

1. What does your roadmap look like? Do you have a roadmap?

2. How reliable is the team about hitting deadlines? Why or why not?

3. Who handles incident response? How frequently does this responsibility rotate?

4. For a given week, how much work is planned vs interrupt driven (e.g. someone needs something by the end of this week and we only learned about it days prior).

5. How much firefighting does this team do? Is this driven by the team's own work or issues in other parts of the organization?

Your mileage may vary, there are a lot of ways to get a sense of how a team/org works and what may be important to me may or may not be as important for you. Cheers!

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

Re: Tech Interview Handbook