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My general line of questioning is as follows: 1) Explain to me a system you built/architected. How it worked, what it did, etc. I'm looking for a deep understa
by pcsanwald 10y ago
My general line of questioning is as follows:
1) Explain to me a system you built/architected. How it worked, what it did, etc. I'm looking for a deep understanding around the requirements of the business, and how that played into technical choices.
2) Talk me through some bugs you encountered or mistakes you made, and how you course corrected. I try to make a candidate comfortable prior to asking this and usually tell a quick and horrifying war story from my own career. Here I want to understand how a candidate processes information and adapts the plan accordingly. Like mike tyson said, everyone's got a plan until they get hit.
3) If you had to build the system again today, what would you do differently? I'm looking for an awareness of how technology has evolved since they designed the system in question, as well as what didn't work well over time from an operational perspective (e.g. we didn't burn off time series data over time so table index rebuilds started to take forever, etc). I want to make sure the candidate supported the system they designed over time, and felt the pain/benefit of their decisions. I usually specifically ask the candidate at the beginning to pick a system they built and supported for an extended period of time.
I also ask about areas of technical expertise, and areas where the candidate feels less strong technically. For the former, I make sure they have the kind of expertise they claim, and for the latter, I want to see how they communicate with team members that are expert in those areas (and how they gain familiarity with new technologies).
- jwilliams 10y agoLots of good answers here (and in this thread in general). I like to focus on the person's history and dig in - war stories for sure. For a software architect you should get a lot just from their CV/Resume. In the interview you get to test how valid and deep this experience is. To your list I'd also add some human factors. Some behavioral interview questions about dealing with difficult people, entrenched opinions, people under stress. You've also got questions such as "what is your favorite/last book on this domain and what was your take away". Or more generally what you like to read and how you stay in the loop.
- BurningFrog 10y agoI just don't remember enough of old projects to answer these questions in any detail.
- pcsanwald 10y agoI solve this by being very clear with candidates ahead of time (i.e. days before the interview) about generally what I'm going to ask, and I've never had a candidate tell me they couldn't recall at some some relevant details from a project. I am generally asking about experiences that were impactful and the lessons learned, not trying to test someone's recall ability.
- BurningFrog 10y agoThat helps. I've had questions like that sprung on me, and I just don't have any prepared war stories to talk about. I try to look forward and not dwell on the past. Or maybe that's how I rationalize bad memory. Either way, when asked about details of something I worked on 8 years ago, I don't have much to say.
- Anasufovic 10y agoYeah, my mind just seems to just abstract it all just into the lessons learned decoupled from its origin. The story is something I can rarely recall. But I was always more into talking about ideas rather than trading stories.
- BurningFrog 10y agoYeah, that describes me better than I could!
- cableshaft 10y agoI'm really bad about this too. I actually got to the point where I googled 'most asked Personality questions in interviews' which had like "Describe a time where you showed leadership." etc, and I have a Google Drive document that has a paragraph answer for each, and I reread that a couple of times before going into an interview so I will have a few of these stories prepared. I still would struggle if you asked too many more details beyond that, though. I had to dig deep into my brain in order to write those paragraphs in the first place. I do the same with technical questions. Anything I get asked (that I remember afterwards) goes into a document (with paragraph answers) that I review before future interviews. I also try to anticipate some other questions and put them in there as well. Because the scope of Computer Science is so big I still get questions I didn't prepare for asked of me pretty much every interview, though, and I struggle through those questions. Despite this, I do have a good memory for work and can keep entire systems in my brain. But in doing so this other crap gets shoved deeper and deeper and are more difficult to retrieve.