5 ms·

Can you clarify as to what kinds of clarifying questions you're looking for? Not trying to be ironic here, just need help with interviewing.

rendaw 6y ago
For example, what does "load" mean? Type it into a browser url bar and press enter? Or just what happens when you press enter (excluding the typing)? Via curl? Or does load refer to just a single HTTP request?
colinrand 6y ago
Certainly. I like to have the candidate ask follow ups like, are you interested in the networking aspects? the brower's behaviors? the way the website handles the request? all of these above? If I phrased the question slightly differently, engineers would have a very different reaction. Q: Can you write a test for me that demonstrates I can load a URL successfully? That could drive the engineer down a different mode of thought. Business stakeholders won't ask for a requirement to implement a test, and the engineer needs to translate the business request into an engineering solution. From what I've seen, different levels of experience in engineer will have different responses and illustrate for me where they are in the engineering journey. A young engineer, perhaps a new college grad or intern, will tend to react to this with a very open mind and lean on their recent academic background, showing excitement with the question and identifying the challenges in it. They usually do pretty well. The mid career programmer often stumbles. They want to show the expertise so latch on to the part of the problem they are most familiar with do show technical prowess. They can often lose the forest for the trees. The senior engineer, will want to know why you're asking and what you're trying to accomplish. Perhaps I'm looking to optimize one part of the problem, perhaps make a step more resilient, more extensible, etc. They will want to know why this question is important for the problems at hand, and hopefully they'll ask about that directly! Hope this gives some insight for you.
- fancyfish 6y ago
  This is great. It's critical to bucket engineers into levels with a checklist like this. Are they eager to explore every corner of the problem, from networking to the browser backend. But not in too great detail - not focusing on one topic too much. But you also don't want them talking too much - a great engineer asks questions as much as provides answers.

rendaw 6y ago

For example, what does "load" mean? Type it into a browser url bar and press enter? Or just what happens when you press enter (excluding the typing)? Via curl? Or does load refer to just a single HTTP request?

colinrand 6y ago

Certainly. I like to have the candidate ask follow ups like, are you interested in the networking aspects? the brower's behaviors? the way the website handles the request? all of these above? If I phrased the question slightly differently, engineers would have a very different reaction. Q: Can you write a test for me that demonstrates I can load a URL successfully? That could drive the engineer down a different mode of thought. Business stakeholders won't ask for a requirement to implement a test, and the engineer needs to translate the business request into an engineering solution. From what I've seen, different levels of experience in engineer will have different responses and illustrate for me where they are in the engineering journey. A young engineer, perhaps a new college grad or intern, will tend to react to this with a very open mind and lean on their recent academic background, showing excitement with the question and identifying the challenges in it. They usually do pretty well. The mid career programmer often stumbles. They want to show the expertise so latch on to the part of the problem they are most familiar with do show technical prowess. They can often lose the forest for the trees. The senior engineer, will want to know why you're asking and what you're trying to accomplish. Perhaps I'm looking to optimize one part of the problem, perhaps make a step more resilient, more extensible, etc. They will want to know why this question is important for the problems at hand, and hopefully they'll ask about that directly! Hope this gives some insight for you.

fancyfish 6y ago
This is great. It's critical to bucket engineers into levels with a checklist like this. Are they eager to explore every corner of the problem, from networking to the browser backend. But not in too great detail - not focusing on one topic too much. But you also don't want them talking too much - a great engineer asks questions as much as provides answers.