You may be asked to participate in a technical interview if the employer would like to evaluate your technical skills as a part of the job application process. Typically, a phone or first-round interview will take place as part of the initial screening, and there will not be many technical questions. Advanced technical questioning will instead take place during the second round of interviews. Some employers may have behavioral and technical interviews.
Technical Interviewing
Candidates should prep the following before an interview
- Review core algorithms and computer science skills.
- Know what technical skills are on your resume.
- Practice writing code with sample questions and focus on your strongest language.
- Practice on a whiteboard or paper.
- Do not use pseudo code. Employers will want to see you use actual code.
- Write in the language in which you feel the most comfortable. If you feel comfortable with a few languages, use the one your interviewer also knows. During the interview, you can ask what your interviewer prefers.
- If an interviewer asks you if you are familiar with a sorting algorithm, do not say yes unless you can demonstrate it on the whiteboard or on paper before him or her.
How to solve any technical interview coding question
- Clarify the question
- Determine inputs and outputs
- Determine edge cases
- Determine the brute force solution
- Optimize your solution BUD
- Bottle necks?
- Unnecessary work?
- Duplicate work?
- Test your solution
- Code your solution
- Walk through and explain your solution
Typical technical interviews will cover
- Object orientation: Do you know what an object is and how to use them?
- Data structures: This consists largely of string manipulations and array problems.
- Algorithmic structure: These include linked lists, bit manipulation, sorting, and searching.
- Testing: How would you test a website? A car?
- Databases: Think SQL. What is a relational database?
Interviewers expect you to
- Be familiar with a language so you can talk about it and solve a coding problem during the interview.
- Explain your thought process and how you are solving the problem, i.e., talk it out. Expect to have a conversation with the interviewer (especially if it is a phone interview). Do not remain quiet when trying to solve the problem. You should talk through the problems and have a conversation with the interviewer about both the benefits and disadvantages of different solutions to the problem.
- Spend as long as you need before moving to the “whiteboard,” and be very sure of what you are about to write. Remember: Until you know your input and your output, you are not ready to write code.
- If you are stuck, start with a simple solution and then upgrade to a more complex solution. A great engineer is someone who knows a little about a lot, and a lot about a little: Be comfortable in the computer science industry but know that you are not expected to be an expert. Bring the conversation back to what you know as often as you can.
- Go beyond giving the interviewer what he or she asked. A top-tier candidate talks about subtleties in design, data structures, and algorithms. You should also be able to offer a variety of alternatives in different situations.
How to handle a 30–45-minute technical interview
- Short introduction: Be ready to talk about the technical skills with which you are most comfortable. This is not a time to exaggerate but be confident in sharing your skills.
- Assessment question: Answer these questions the best you can. Remember that it is more important to get the high-level correct answer than to write code perfectly, but perfect code is a plus.
- Test your code: Stand back and make sure that what you wrote is correct. Show the interviewer that the performance and accuracy of your code is important to you.
Additional tips
- Realize that the interviewer is not out to trick you.
- Be relaxed and be calm as you work through the technical problems.
- Be polite and sociable. The interviewer wants to know if they can work with you.
Sample questions
- Realize that the interviewer is not out to trick you.
- Be relaxed and be calm as you work through the technical problems.
- Be polite and sociable. The interviewer wants to know if they can work with you.
Resources for interview prep
Websites
- HackerRank (entry level website & programming challenges to stay sharp on your skills)
- LeetCode (some of these actual questions could be used in interviews)
- GeeksforGeeks (well-developed explanations of complicated topics)
- Big Interview (on-demand mock interviews)
- Codecademy (learn coding)
- Girls Who Code – Forage (a virtual work simulation on technical interviewing)
Books
- Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
- Introduction to Algorithms by Charles E. Leiserson, Clifford Stein, Ronald Rivest, and Thomas H. Cormen