Comment by matthewrhoden1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewrhoden1 | Hacker News Reader

Most of the questions in your interviews are not actually technical, unless your interviewing google or something. Here was my approach and I got a very large pay bump as a result :)

Sit down and list all your projects you completed at your previous jobs. These will give you a great refresher and are going to be your talking points. Have both good and bad points ready. The bad points are for curve ball of questions like, "whats you're weak point." It will also show you can reflect and improve.

Go crazy lining up interviews, that's one great thing about our industry, no shortage of companies to interview with.

A few hours before each interview, look at the job description for clues. You'll pick your top three things that you feel would make you a great fit for the company based on your past experience. "Need to be able to refactor", hey that's all I did at x company for y time and of course the project was successful based on z metric.

That was mostly it, of course it helps to do a quick refresher of tech specific interview questions from google. This is mostly to boost your confidence and to keep you from feeling too nervous.

Good luck!

If hes applying to engineering positions, any company worth anything will definitely give a technical interview. Practically every company I interviewed at (in TO, NY, SF, LA) had atleast a 30min tech interview or exercise.

Let alone the onsite- where you are guaranteed a few tech sessions.

What kind of a job does this apply to? I and every single friend of mine that went through interviews for tech companies had to go through multiple rounds of technical interviews that mainly involved problem solving, followed by like one non-technical interview.

I applied to full stack positions for mid to senior level. Some do go into technical questions, that's what the brush up is for, however they usually target exactly what was in their job description.

If you're an engineer I'm assuming you can usually fight your way through a problem they give you. A lot of places I interviewed seemed to do the same thing -> (man I have an interview, better google a few questions to ask them).

The important part is that you look at their job description, you will usually cover 75% of the interview preparing like that.

This is true for smaller companies, that hire for targeted roles, take the time to write good job descriptions and may even think a bit about what they are doing, because every person they hire makes or breaks the company.

The moment a company enters growth phase and they need a lot of talent, nearly everything goes out of the window. Most (not all) job descriptions become generic and less thoughtful and they resort to generic technical questions in interviews, simply because there aren't that many candidates who have relevant backgrounds (e.g. I need someone to work on deployment systems, but you have payment systems background) and they can't wait forever.

Obviously there are exceptions on both sides, but this is generally how it pans out, in my experience.

(Source: Years of hiring in the Valley, and now running http://InterviewKickstart.com)

In North America at least, any good tech company worth working for will ask you to write code on a whiteboard or computer. I am not sure where do you interview.

Northern Virginia, yes they sometimes do. I got more of the language specific questions though. "In C# what's the difference between static and const."

When I interviewed google, they wanted me to code something up for them. In California, again I had mostly language specific questions. I did get more logic questions though. It varies from company to company.

Most engineers I talk with though, don't struggle with the problem solving. It's the soft skills and being able to confidently respond to typical questions that they had a hard time with. Easy fix if you do what I suggested.

The "I did X that caused Y, which is a percent of Z" is probably the best ways to frame your experience on a resume.

> These will give you a great refresher and are going to be your talking points.

I actually make it a point not to delve too deep into a candidate's own projects. I would rather throw them an unfamiliar or (slightly unfamiliar) idea and have them work a solution with me.

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