Software Developer Interview Advice

Software Developer Interviews are difficult and painful for nearly everyone involved. Interviewers are looking to find great additions to the team, interviewees are looking for great places to work, sometimes everyone ends up a bit disappointed. So what can we do to improve the experience of software developer job interviews, for interviewers and interviewees? If you are looking for a job, what should you look for from your interviewers, and how should you present yourself best to impress them? If you are looking to recruit, how can you do better than list some arbitrary list of technical skills and ask hard questions that even you had to look up the answer to online?
In this episode, Dave Farley, of Continuous Delivery, talks about his experience of technical interviews. Dave has conducted hundreds of software engineer job interviews and has some thoughts on how we could do better as both interviewers and as interviewees. So check out Dave’s technical interview tips, and let us know yours in the comments below.
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[@dafyddrees2287]

4:24 "We want replaceable developers and we don't want to train them." - What I describe as the "lightbulb model" of tech recruitment. i.e. hire smart but naive, highly motivated ("passionate") people that have learned the latest tech. Use them like lightbulbs. Get them to burn as brightly as possible and then throw them away and hire new ones.

[@metalalive2006]

Yes, their mindset are like the lightbulbs are everywhere so would be easy for them to replace with new one after old one is broken...

[@KingJahfy1]

Indeed. Unfortunately many of companies I have come across do not think about growing / building talent.

[@rothbardfreedom]

"Talk as people" is what this industry needs everywhere.

[@JuanRV73]

the human aspect is in my opinion the most overlooked, yet the most critical factor in every tech endeavor

[@dafyddrees2287]

@@JuanRV73 It's quite depressing how development is reduced to "typing code" in the latest flashy technologies. It was never like that but almost always is treated that way by people that can't do it themselves - but are in charge.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

I think we are victims of the common media stereotype of "anti-social-genius-nerd". There is probably some truth in it, but it isn't really true, and it is certainly not true of the best software people that I have worked with. Often nerdy, sure, I know I am, but also capable of working well with others, and of explaining themselves.

[@mecanuktutorials6476]

@@ContinuousDelivery R&D and low level optimizations often do require an “anti-social-genius-nerd”. These people can definitely put together great products all by themselves. But … they don’t work well for others or with others. So business people don’t like them.

[@edgeeffect]

​@@ContinuousDeliverySo many jobs these days seem to combat the "antisocial" stereotype with annoying forced "social" events where "the whole team gets together each week for pizza and video games". It's made me far more antisocial than I ever was before.

[@alistairdrose1]

Definitely agreed on the conversational approach but not a fan of paring in an interview setting. I once completed a TDD Kata the day before an interview. During the interview, I was asked to pair on an exercise that happened to be the very same TDD Kata that I had worked through the day before. In that setting though, I was useless. I couldn't even manage simple language syntax when knowing(or feeling) that I was being judged on every key press. My additional advice regarding CVs box ticking exercises, having interviewed many people over the years is to be aware that some candidates detail the projects they work on but not their own contribution to it. To resolve this, talk through the challenges encountered, the thought processes, trade offs made, and lessons learned during the project.

[@cccc2740]

Recently an HR(yes, an HR) rejected my application for a developer role because I havent been working on jenkins pipeline in my current job.. 😂

[@georgehelyar]

If they wanted you to work on a Jenkins pipeline, you probably didn't want that job anyway ;) There are much nicer ways to write pipelines now.

[@BlackM3sh]

@@georgehelyar Could you give an example?

[@brixomatic]

@@BlackM3sh Enter $ANYONES_FAV_TECHNOLOGY here. Quite simply: It's bollocks. When it comes to build scripts, for example, I know people who'd probably stick to makefiles for the rest of their lives and it works perfectly for them, but they'e sticking to Linux too, and Windows users have to take extra turns to make it work. I know people who fell in love with Maven and they would twist everything to make it work in Maven, before they consider breaking out of it. It's the same for web frameworks: The moment you chose to use one, there are three new ones on the market that claim to do everything better, be more lightweight (then missing features), better performing (then missing features or flexibility), being very flexible (being complicated even for simple use cases), being feature rich (then being big, because they're containing more than you need).... you name it.

[@edgeeffect]

I get rejections like this from self-styled CTOs mostly... you don't have to work in HR to do really bad interviews.

[@helhindi]

“The tech matters less than the person” - This is so true and is always forgotten in tech interviews…..

[@travelsumatra2393]

"Tech matter less than a person", couldn't agree more.

[@arakovskiy]

Individuals and interactions more than instruments and processes

[@cyclox73]

This is exactly what I needed to see. It amazes me how quickly a strong, good candidate can lose confidence because they have bad technical interviews. This video made me realize that you have to approach interviews with all that you have to offer, not just that you can reverse a linked list.

[@samfrostinjapan]

I want more companies and recruiters to see this.

[@ALGouldUK]

Absolutely agree. Working practices, being able to think things through, working as a team matter far more. Yet majority of interviews seem to pick some obscure part their tech stack and ask questions on it.

[@rajm1976]

Great video. I've been very successful in interviews because I approach them from the perspective of a 'chat about IT and tech' with other people who love it. I never look desperate, I am always honest about what I know and don't know. You are going to be working with them so it may as well be as easy going as possible. If the conversation flows, it's a good sign, if it's awkward and cumbersome then it's bad. The interview should evolve into a conversation as it goes on

[@kaostheory1050]

I love to launch the conversation with "We're really proud of the work we do. Tell me about the project you're most proud of. " I find that good developers are proud of their work, remember their work, know the why behind their work, and can speak fluently about it.

[@realroadrunnr]

14:03 "Tell them there and then" and pretty the whole respect thing. I've done a fair amount of interviews as an interviewer myself to have a rather good judgement whether an interview went well or not. Plus, at my previous job, where I did most of this interviewing, we had the policy to tell every applicant after each step in our recruiting process what the outcome of the step was. So if you were a no, you'd know. If you were a yes or an "advance to the next round", you'd know. And if you were an "I'm not sure, but I'd like to give it a try", you would know. And then last year I was on the other side of the table again and I was shocked to see how companies treated me. Not hearing anything for weeks even after me inquiring again - getting a "we hired someone else who fits the job better" when it was very clear from the interview that I demanded a higher salary than they were willing to pay (which is completely fair!). You always read/see/hear in the media how we don't have enough qualified people in the IT industry but still the recruitment process in many companies - even tech companies - rather implied the opposite.

[@azmodanpc]

Blaming the lack of candidates on the poor sods that apply for the job and get treated like sh*t in interviews and try to apply even if the laundry list of requirements is something out of a fever dream (and a wish list to boot).

[@ForgottenKnight1]

Gonna be honest with you. I think I've done probably 100+ interviews in my career so far and I never had an interview like this guy describes :)

[@ian1352]

What I really hate are those silly algorithm questions. You know, like write out the code to do a merge sort. I have never had to use even one of those things in the actual job. Then there are all those questions they ask to see if you're flexible, adaptable and can learn new things. Once on the job they push you into a niche and keep you there forever.

[@alex_chugaev]

Hello Dave. Could you make a video on micromanagement and it's "smells"?

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Have you seen this one on "Leading Technical Teams" kzbin.info/www/bejne/oH7TdHlmj5tladU I talk about Micromanagement in that, also a little in this on Remote teams kzbin.info/www/bejne/gn3cpYJ-ep2WgLc

[@alex_chugaev]

@@ContinuousDelivery thanks 😊

[@jamesgg9950]

Required: 5+ years experience in tech that didn't exist 5 months ago.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Yes I have seen that too 🤣

[@stephenbutler3929]

IKR - I usually just ignore those...

[@JamesSmith-cm7sg]

100% agree with those open ended questions. Some I like are: "what actually happens when you enter a domain name into your browser?" "What does quality software look like to you?" "What are some security concerns you keep in mind when writing code and/or cloud infrastructure?"

[@aurelienrb]

Another one I like a lot to ask : "How do you handle legacy code and technical debt?"

[@edgeeffect]

Sadly no interviewer asks those questions. In mine I'm far more likely to get "in your current role do you use PHPUnit?", "How many years have you used Kubernetes for?", etc, etc.

[@RoelBaardman]

The best series of interviews that I have done were at an algorithmic trading firm. - First I got a homework assignment with time limit. This assignment was very representative of the role and there was no single right answer (I wrote python, but there was a commandline tool I didn't know). - I then spent two hours solving technical problems with my future teammates, because working as a team was very important at this role. - I spent an entire day at the firm, talking to the disciplines I would be working with. The single best question I got was from someone from another department. He came into the room carrying my CV and asked me right off the bat: "Tell me something about yourself that I can't find on your CV". I've asked this question myself, and it has always given me good insights into the person I was talking to. There's simply no preparing for that question. I didn't get the job, and rightly so. But the interview process was a great way to learn. I got such a clear picture about the role and the people I was going to be working with. I've never seen any interview process come close of this.

[@juliankandlhofer7553]

Sounds like either a great way to get to know your future job or a great way to waste a few days... I hope you at least got paid for those hours :)

[@dtc357]

I sure hope this gets pumped up in the YT algorithm, people need to see this one. Just went through 3 weeks of interviews and this video highlights why the offer came from where it did and why the interview I stopped 5 mins in and said thank you I'm not interested ended the way it did.

[@Khushpich]

I wish all recruiters watch this

[@MartinRyleOShea]

Doing an other interview tomorrow morning. Glad to hear the list of questions I prepared with my team fit roughly what your saying Dave. I care about how you learn, your passions, how you work with others and if you know how a computer works not how a programming language works.

[@hazemhatem9701]

the current "HR who looking for Talents" trying to match your skills with job description only, I wish many people like you be in our Tech industry

[@michaelovie5582]

Such a great and insightful video. Many thanks for doing all you do sire! I wish to meet you someday...

[@ern0plus4]

My best phone screening went... - So, it is a CIO position. - Okay, I am working as programmer for decades, but I was CTO when I was young, and I enjoyed it, go on. - The company is at M. (230 km / 140 miles from my town). - Okay, I assume I have to be there 1-2x a week. - Well, everyday. Where do you live? - B. - It's near to M, isn't it? - It's 230 km - (Anyway, it's "near" in American scale, or "just next door" in Australian.) - Is it okay for you? - Sure, go ahead. - So, the technologies are .NET and C#. - Hm, I'm a Linux C/C++, Python etc. developer. Well, have you read my CV? - No. - Well, you might read it. And not only mine, read all CVs, they're full of useful information about the candidates: where they live, what they do, what technology they're familiar with. I promise, your work will be complete different, much more easier, your life will be changed! #truestory

[@buntawrx]

You handled that quite well and diplomatically. Well done!

[@ern0plus4]

@@buntawrx Thx, the answer first came to my mind was a bit different, but if there's only 1% chance that she follows my instructions, it's worth to be polite.

[@CTimmerman]

Wow, she got to the point quickly. I keep getting "Hi, this is X from Y. We spoke last year/my colleague is on vacation/I cover Z etc blabla and would like to know whether you would be interested in planning a meeting to talk about some exciting new opportunities I have for you." despite my resume explicitly stating no recruiters and not even being open to work anymore.

[@NoNameNoShame22]

FAANG be like: Best I can do: implement a red-black tree on a whiteboard without errors or warnings.

[@afaf6478]

So many companies use automated systems for resume analysis. The problem is that nobody tells applicants what formatting to use as to not break that automated system. So, in the end a lot of HR departments choose people based on resume formatting first and then based on skills/experience. It should be the other way around

[@chrisalexthomas]

I'm so thankful to know that these ideas aren't just a figment of my imagination. It would be so much better if everybody watched this video and took onboard it's ideas cause I've been in so many ridiculous interview processes. Such as somebody commenting how I've got such a lot of experience and a very impressive github, only to then go on to ask me if I know what HTTP verbs are typically used in a REST api. Like, how lazy can people be when even on the face of it such a question is ridiculous. But time and time again, it keeps repeating itself.

[@VeslorTV]

Thanks for sharing!

[@mohammadshahabrafiq]

There is some really good advice in this video. As a Software Engineer contractor I have been for many interview and I have found that some my best interviews have been where I have had a good conversation. I always try and turn my interviews into conversations. I have found this to be very successful technique.

[@probuilderai]

Great insights Dave, thanks for sharing. I'm hiring 21 fullstack devs, QA, and leads in Toronto - happy to say that I'm doing most of what you recommend already in my interviews. In case you're curious, I have never considered informing a candidate if it's looking like a no and giving them a chance to correct course. I'll start doing that next.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thanks for the feedback. Good luck with your recruitment!

[@softwaretechnologyengineering]

I've definitely had my experiences with paint by numbers style recruiters. How many years of this do you have, how many years of that. Very frustrating given the time I spend self learning instead passively counting away the years waiting for the learning to come to me. The best recruiters seem to be able to understand that the job specs are not boolean switches and can advocate for you as a candidate as well as sell the business to you as a candidate. They can assess what you are looking for and get a feel for a good match. Once the process gets to interviews and talking with engineers its a bit better.

[@thomasdarimont]

Valuable advice for candidates and interviewers alike.

[@khana.713]

This channel is probably the one that needs to go viral and mainstream. Amazing content

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thank you!

[@scotttang6229]

Agreed 100%! Thank you!

[@Sorc47]

This is really great. In the end everything comes down to just talking with others. It's actually quite simple when people stop insisting on overcomplicating things.

[@evgenyamorozov]

The hardest job in the world...

[@fauredaniel57]

Dave, this is trully a good one. Congrats & thanks.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Glad you liked it!

[@timmartin325]

Excellent video!

[@SaifUlIslam-di5xv]

Thank you for your time! This was great. As evidence for future watchers, as of typing right now, there are 12,333 views, 822 likes and 0 dislikes. Balanced, as all things should be.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thanks 😎

[@ScROnZjara]

1000+ likes to 0 dislikes. This is quality!!!

[@marcelbritsch5127]

Excellent advice, very well summarised. Thank you! While this focuses on hiring software engineers, I feel this applies to a massive degree to all roles :) So true about the point on 'interviewing the interviewers' many HR departments so do not understand that it's a dual-sided game.

[@thescourgeofathousan]

This was such a wonderful find; I have been interviewing candidates in the conversational way and concentrating on the “good developer” rather that technicalities of language etc questions for some time now and have run into enough skepticism and disapproval from team leaders, managers, clients etc I’m ding the interview for that I was starting to consider capitulating and going back to the more “corporate way” but now I feel renewed. Thanks Dave!

[@edgeeffect]

Where are the people like you at the interviews I get?

[@nicoberrogorry]

This is amazing.

[@michaelshea4834]

Refreshing!

[@PRIM305]

Wow I'm early and this was a pleasure to watch

[@gauravbisht4649]

👍 thank you!

[@strategy_gal]

It's better to hire someone based on character cause skills can be taught. It's always best to go with someone who is willing to be trained than someone who "might" have all the skills but is untrainable. This video totally resonates with me. Thanks for doing this, Dave!

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thanks 🙂

[@TheTaraspol]

That's just great!

[@michaelhughes8413]

Brilliant advice

[@majorhumbert676]

This is why I dread interviews with more than two people. If I'm tasked to do an interview with one or more colleagues, it is difficult for me to steer the interview into a conversation, and to give the interviewee a chance to ask me questions.

[@macfarmw]

This is very wise advice.

[@kstark321]

This is so spot on as both a hiring manager and a candidate. I can spot a bad place to work when the hiring managers are grilling me about my specific technical skill set because the large orgs I oversee doesn't align exactly with the technical debt they've painted themselves into a corner even though their support orgs are half the size and complexity of mine. Then they wonder why they have high turnover.

[@tomnjagi5358]

Excellent watch as usual. Every time I think I've learned everything from this channel, another vid drops, another quantum leap of understanding happens. Thanks for sharing. Jeremy Clarkson sort of looks like U. Hehe

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thanks for that!

[@dev_taco]

Where does he find these wonderful shirts.

[@j.j.9538]

Amazing!

[@haseebs.7286]

10:22 I don’t think judging someone’s ability to speak about that vague prompt/topic is necessarily a good indicator of their ability to perform or learn the job either. Unless the job were designing or assembling a computer. In some ways it would reveal more about their background or domain but how would that provide insight into how they solve business problems or even write code. It would be like asking a writer how a keyboard works or call centre clerk how a phone works. I think open ended questions could work as long as they aren’t phrased in a textbook manner like “How does this work”. Explain the problem you actually need to solve and ask: “How would you solve it?”

[@marna_li]

As someone who now is in-between jobs, with a background in consulting, I'm scared of interviews based on my experience when I finally got the job. They did not care about my personality, and my experience from the assignments was that I was an outsider. No one was cared about my technical expertise, and I felt so under-appreciated - as "just as consultant".

[@ChristopherCricketWallace]

I want to work for this guy!

[@marcusjenkins]

Nice timing, Dave. I have a Big Interview Day coming up in ten days... (as interviewee). I have ten days to learn Swift. I can't be that hard. Ahem.

[@juliankandlhofer7553]

as he said, its much more important that you are a good software developer in general that to be an expert at exactly what they are looking for. if you're good, you'll pick up swift in no time but you have to be honest and up front about that. Good Luck!

[@chandl34]

That's not too bad. I had to learn Kotlin in 1-2 days for a recent interview, so I could use it in an Android take-home project. If you're learning Swift for iOS development, it's more important that you already know iOS. Depending on the seniority of the position, they will also focus more on standard practices for iOS development.

[@arakovskiy]

God, thank you! Someone had to tell that!

[@mhcbon4606]

you are so right on time for me. Let s see what is your advices. I might have one more ! let s see

[@presbiteroo]

I will have my first technical interview in 2 days. Perfect timing!

[@rajm1976]

Good luck.

[@piotrmarszaek9300]

Fingers crossed!

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Good luck!

[@spinnetti]

As someone on both sides of that fence a lot lately, that was nice. I do some of those things, and see where I can do better as an interviewer, and on the flip sidebjust missed a position where the interviewer was trying to hire himself instead of a complimentary and diverse set of talents. Sounds like for the best I didn't get it.

[@BarriosGroupie]

Mike, can I ask: what's your highest technical academic qualification? I found that a HNC/HND qualification was usually sufficient for someone to do well at the companies I worked at, even being promoted over some with an Oxbridge qualification, if they had the ability to get things done, had a long term career plan, and possessed very good interpersonal skills.

[@macigli]

Cool t-shirt :)

[@BahtiyarAliALHAS]

I'm watching this video exactly after my interview. -_-

[@scvnthorpe__]

Been looking for a company that'll take me and is ok with me learning and doesn't have terminal HR syndrome. I got close recently, but I do need to improve my pair programming! Being on the ASD spectrum I'll often half finish sentences when I'm anxious especially as more of a visual thinker so tightening that up is on my agenda.

[@TARJohnson1979]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/rKiQc5WGeriSbJY

[@ExpatTraderFX]

hello, Love your content Just one little thing i want to mention, for some reason your videos have really low volume maybe you can look into that please!

[@petebrown6356]

I've no idea how many people I've interviewed at this point...but I find it useful to ask them to speak in detail about projects they've listed on their resume. They should be able to talk at length, also without using "we" all the time. When I hear "we" I'm hearing that the TEAM accomplished something but I really want to know what YOU accomplished. Computer languages are just a means to an end. Good design and broad understanding of the underlying technologies is what counts, a language is an implementation detail. A good software engineer should be able to learn a new language very quickly.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

It's funny how different our responses can be to simple words sometimes 🤔 When I hear "We" at interview, my first thought is that maybe this person is good at collaborating. If I here only "I" I'll be digging for to see if we have a prima-donna here. In both cases, routes to explore rather than disqualifying characteristics.

[@edgeeffect]

Pete... no! Dave... YES!

[@petebrown6356]

@edgeeffect I've interviewed many that can say "we" but when pressed for what THEY did they can't articulate anything.

[@miramar-103]

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on FAANG style interviews .. where the emphasis seems to be less about actual experience and more about whether or not you can solve random leetcode problems on a whiteboard within a short timeframe - this format is unfortunately becoming all too common these days ....

[@ContinuousDelivery]

I think it better that interviews are focused on ability to problem solve rather than knowing arcane aspects of a programming language of framework. Otherwise, not much experience of them.

[@diononeofyourbusiness8634]

I always like the approach to give the interviewee a little coding Kata exercise the weekend before the second interview. I do not want to look over their shoulder as they type. I want to see how they structure the problem and how they solve it. I want them to communicate their assumptions. I then use their solution as a stepping board for discussions on code quality, extensibility and also programming patterns. I don't want them to know their patterns by heart, we can look up together what might fit. I want to see HOW he works. Not the performance he delivered in a singular point in time.

[@mohammadalkalaleeb2446]

So, no ghosting then 😂 I have been interviews to get another job in another market for a couple of months now, and frankly I really hate the process so far. Currently the way it goes is, you start by an initial interview with a recruiter, another with HR, another with Technical team (General Setting), they send a useless task, and give you a week, after that you are scheduled for another interview (Android in my case) and another one with a manager of some sort. The process is slow, painful, useless and quite annoying actually. To me, I say we should think of newer ways to make this works, the pipeline sucks and everyone knows it. A big problem in our world is that industries do what they did zillion years ago, no change, no improvement, and even with newer technologies like software, they have adapted the recruitment process of other industries even when the process is quite unique. I'm not claiming to know the answer, but I just want recruiters and companies to reconsider this awful method of recruiting. #JustSayin #Personal_Opinion

[@CTimmerman]

Let devs find their own team mates online. Devs should at least read the CV enough to see if it matches the job, and can immediately tell whether they'd get along with someone irl before inviting them over and wasting everyone's time.

[@helidrones]

I have been working for about ten years as a Developer until 1997, then left the IT and led my own dance studio for the last 25 years. Now I am returning to the IT industry. Tomorrow I have been invited to a video interview. I am supposed to walk the employer through some code that I have written. Tbh, I am a bit nervous, haven't had an interview for a quarter of a century. Let's see how it goes.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Unless the interviewer is an idiot, nervous is ok, but I'd recommend that you start from the position "I can do this job" and "What do I need from this employer to see if the job is right for me". This should set you up to be "in your zone" rather than "in theirs". Good luck!

[@brixomatic]

I don't like to make people program in interviews, I assume they can do it if the resume is suggesting this. For the technical discussion, I like to show them a program that does what it claims to do and then like to talk about the design of it. A devs experience will show up in the way they think about some code. Most people will be able tell you what the code does, but it's a good question to ask "What would you do to this code, if it was yours?" The more experienced people might note this is as good as it needs to be, as: "If it does the job, so it's good enough", others might say there's some guards missing (they might come from a DBC background), they might argue there is something that can or should be abstracted, they can talk about decoupling, single responsibilities and stuff, meaning they've got a feel for architecture/CleanCode, they might say they'd expect some methods to look different so they can be tested easier, etc. This very much shows their mindset and then it's yours to decide if that mindset is missing in your company. I like to talk about what they expect from the company, why they're changing jobs, what they would like to see, just to know whether they will feel at home in the company, or if what they bring to the table might be something that needs more traction in the own company. Are they advocates of test first programming? Good: That might be missing. Are they the kind of people who'd not test first, but hack stuff quickly to get something out and deal with the edge cases later? This can also be a good trait, if you feel your group is sometimes overcautious and too much in love with "good engineering practices" and you need someone to just take a dive and check uncharted territory. I think that a company needs a good solid base of people who really take a lot of care and it also need some rather careless people who just "go for it", they usually cause a stir, but they're also the people who take you out of your comfort zone, sometimes break a paralysis. I do like to ask people how they worked, have they sat together with customer representatives, have they just implemented a requirements document, have they been in a group with QA and requirements engineering to work out requirements and how they can be tested? Etc.. things like that.

[@mattsadventureswithart5764]

"What would you do to this code?" Document it with lots of comments and *why* it is written the way it is, so that future maintainers can instantly understand it.

[@brixomatic]

@@mattsadventureswithart5764 If it needs lots of comments, it's probably not good code. If, however, this code looks more complicated than it needs to be, and for a good reason, the thinking behind it should be documented. Mind that code documentation is usually the first thing to become stale when code is changed and describing the algorithm next to expressing it in code, is doing it twice. Code is there for humans to read, if it compiles the computer will understand it no matter how bad it looks to the human eye. So, if the person interviewed noticed that the code seems to lack documentation, the first question I'd ask would be: "How would you transform this, so it needs less to no documentation?"

[@adambickford8720]

As an interviewer, differentiate yourself and try to leave me feeling excited. Convince me I want to work w/you by saying something funny/insightful/etc. Show me some enthusiasm and engagement! Rant about the design of the java collections API, the ivory towerness of HATEOS, anything! This isn't a mid-term you're trying not to fail, this is your time to convince me you're a peer. I have a dozen more candidates w/the same alphabet soup of 'qualifications' as you; you will struggle trying to "out tech" them. After a certain minimum level it's the intangibles that matter.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thanks for sharing your perspective!

[@autogenes]

nice

[@_C_-l-_-l-]

Gold

[@gronkymug2590]

Almost no interviewers do that. Everyone asks questions and make assumptions afterwards. I would even say that specifying interview length and trying to keep to the schedule shows a bad approach. Most companies can't even come back with appropriate feedback except of usual excuses which don't let you improve in any way or even make an educated decision why this role might not be for you.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

I saw a comment from you to another video, asking about references. For some weird quirk of KZbin, I can't find that comment to reply to, so forgive me replying here instead. In most cases I try to always include references in the video description. Click on the description and it should open to show you, usually, lots of links a follow-up stuff. Most (probably 60-70%) of my data comes from the State Of DevOps reports, and the Accelerate book though - both are from the same people, and are a genuinely scientific approach to understanding practice in SW dev.

[@gronkymug2590]

@@ContinuousDelivery Thank you for your reply. I deleted that other comment soon after I posted it. I have been watching your videos recently and I like them. I wish I could see more of the pipelines which deploy straight to production after the initial CI and then do all the other tests there. How I see it is by making CI and then canary deployment with feature flag off, to allow some automatic tests on production for small group of users, and then canary feature flag releases for turning the new features for exploratory testers and then slowly the rest of the users. But I wish to see realistic version of such a pipeline.

[@iham1313]

so the basic advice is to find an interviewer that can interview and go beyond ticking of boxes ... find some interviewer that can distinct between hard skills (languages, tech) and soft skills (learning, communication, problem solving)

[@MrVignesh028]

I wish I had a mentor like him. while attending the technical interview my confidence used to be low especially when the interviewer was making fun of me.

[@RaidenFreeman]

If the interviewer made fun of you, you don't want to work there, he did you a favor. In an interview you show your best self, imagine how they would be after they hired you.

[@AbhijithVMohan]

You are interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you.

[@metalalive2006]

10:00 To have ability of clearly expressing things to others , it still relies on your past experience (mostly from workplace I think ) , what if you have very little chance (or no chance) to practice such communication skill from workplace ? For example your team (tech) manager or coworkers always plays blame game without giving you constructive feedback when you failed to make them understand your thoughts? Any suggestion for such person so he / she can improve to describe freely ( technical) stuff ? Thanks for reading

[@Ashton666]

Look up Feynman's method of learning, where being able to clearly explain something is an integral part of. It's not about tech, it's about anything, but it's from Richard Feynman: a physicist know for taking subjects that only experts knew, and usually had no idea on how to teach it, and explaining it in an understandable way. Not to mention Feynman's diagrams for particles interactions in quantum field theory, where he found a way to solve equations that had a bunch of infinites and barely anyone could solve anything, and all he did was make drawings of them.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Ah, a fellow Feynman fan 😁 Yes, 💯 I apply this to myself all the time, if I can’t explain it to someone else, whatever their level of understanding, I don’t really understand it myself yet.

[@Ashton666]

And now my admiration for you has increased!

[@LucTaylor]

I did an interview where they had me play the game Human Resource Machine.... that was a fun interview Well we did other things too

[@florianbachmann]

Yeah

[@AdamMotlik]

@continuousdelivery @Dave I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis a couple years ago. I am try like hell to learn Python and be useful to my company, but I fear that I am drifting closer to the next RIF. How can I cram all that knowledge into my head? I've got academic experience with programming. And a lot of practical BASH. How would you recommend that I approach learning? Any home-related programs that you'd recommend for learning?

[@ContinuousDelivery]

I have a few of pieces of advice. The first is to do lots of programming. Find something that interests you, a problem that irritates you and you wish you had tools to solve, or a field that you find interesting and write software to solve the problem or explore the subject. I think Python is a lovely language for exploration! I used to play with graphics a lot when I was starting out, doing all sorts of things from simple to quite complicated. I learned quite a lot of my my trade by playing! These days, I no longer get to write software for a living, but I still write software often. One of my favourite sources of problems to solve in software, being a nerd, is projecteuler.net it presents a bunch of maths problems that you can solve in software. My second suggestion is TDD. Checkout online-training.jbrains.ca/p/wbitdd-01 he has some free TDD training. Work through that and then apply TDD to your exciting home project. You can practice TDD, in Python with some suggested coding kata examples at cyber-dojo.org for free. Last is find an open source project that interests you and fix some bugs or add some features and submit them. I hope that some of these ideas help, good luck.

[@AdamMotlik]

@@ContinuousDelivery quality advice. Thank you, Sir. Feeling vulnerable is terrible. I feel like having that extra edge would almost surely prevent me from becoming suddenly unemployed. I think that I will talk to my wife about scheduling an hour a day for a little while. Or, possibly, a couple hours a weekend. Dave, if you are ever in the St Louis area and would like to grab an intoxicative choice, hit me up.

[@privateparty4900]

5:10 The problem with this thought process is that, if I'm hiring someone to do green-field development in angular for a project that starts next week, I don't have months for them to get a to a point where they can make sound design decisions in an unfamiliar framework. There's room to grow on the nice-to-haves -- I'm not asking trivia questions about MySQL vs MS SQL -- but if you're coming in to lay down the foundation of a modern application? You should probably have a deep working knowledge of the specific framework that's going to be used.

[@eduardoalvarez2497]

In that case you aren't hiring an employee but a consultant. Because your needs are immediate short term instead of long term.

[@privateparty4900]

@@eduardoalvarez2497 Consultant implies short term but of course they often end up being long term. Yes, my experience has been that the vast majority of hiring -- at least in the small and medium business world -- is done with an immediate short term goal, budget, and timeline in mind.

[@stephenbutler3929]

What about when the framework is new and no one has written anything like that yet? How do you overcome that issue in your world?

[@eduardoalvarez2497]

@@stephenbutler3929 is very rare than a company would use something that new because they are risk adverse. Startups on the other hand can take those risks, but true startups are founded by the same people building the app instead of outsourcing.

[@privateparty4900]

​@@stephenbutler3929 Use a more mature framework is the most obvious answer.

[@javadnoruzi908]

Better to have two separate videos : one for interviewee and other for interviewers. it will prevent waste of time.

[@minefacex]

0 dislikes, just as it should be.

[@scottthornton4220]

I have a Ph.D. and I also interview a lot of developers with Ph.Ds (that are different than mine). I like to ask them about projects / papers / dissertation and then I evaluate on how they answer the question. Can they walk me through the big picture and key details of their project? Can they answer my questions (even if they are naive)? Are we having a dialogue about something they know? Or are they just talking at me? Do they try to break it down for me, or confuse me with irrelevant details? .... Anywho, great video!!!

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thanks for sharing your suggestions for interview Qs.

[@sifblack6043]

I'm loving that Pinky and the Brain shirt 😎

[@DirkBotha]

Bad interview question: What does 'sudo' do? Good interview question: How does one stop a process that was started by the root user? Bad interview question: How many bits in an unsigned integer when working in C++? Good interview question: I only have a 32bit system. But I often have to deal with unsigned values exceeding 5 billion, how would you suggest I deal with that? Bad interview question: FizzBuzz!!!!! Seriously! Good interview question: Tell me about the best piece of software you've ever written. BEST interview question: Would you like some coffee?

[@sdb584]

Would you proceed with a candidate claiming to be a lead who misses your call due to them unable to find their phone within the large pockets of their sweatpants? Would you proceed with the same candidate who tells you their phone may run out of juice during the interview?

[@evandrofilipe1526]

0:06 never cuz I'm 15 right now

[@evandrofilipe1526]

@@revolct thank you

[@Zawar2003]

can you not take my interview? don't hire me but I have never given such an interview. its always about what a library or a function in some language does.

[@aminekaddache9767]

i really like your t-shirt 👚

[@kjdtm]

PINKY AND BRAIN !!!!!

[@edgeeffect]

"How does a computer work?" "Do you want me to go down to transistors, or will microcode do?"

[@ContinuousDelivery]

We used to leave it to you. Any answer may be ok, but it would tell us something about how you thought about things. Ok, “magic fairies” wasn’t ok, but we didn’t need everyone to know how Silicon doping works.

[@guillermotomasini]

100% agree, but sadly amazon nonsense interviews are the trendy today.

[@lyingcat9022]

I’ve never been interviewed :(

[@QuadmanSwe]

Let me know if you want interview practice over slack or discord.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Kind offer! Well done!

[@al_capad]

Pre-screen CVs, gramatic errors and more than 2 pages are usual hints for elimination. Look for Github repositories or websites with code and/or released product. Do IQ and 5/6 personality tests. Then send simple homework + pair programming during or after interview. Congrats, now chances of hiring proper person went from 50/50 (or less, interviewers tend to prefer agreeable, extroverted people) to around 85%. If you're looking for a job, you should not care about most of the requirements - education, technology or minimum years of experience are more suggestions than actual requirement. Don't go in t-shirt or yoga pants, have an actual hobby that you can describe, it's a good conversation starter. Avoid putting yourself in "fight or flight" mode.

[@CTimmerman]

I'd trust someone in a t-shirt more than someone who lies about requirements.

[@edgeeffect]

The moment you got those IQ and stupid personality tests out, I would just leave.

[@wiriantodjunaidi7472]

Hi Dave, how will you structure your interview process where it is a market where the candidate can't afford to spend a lot of times pair programming with your team. Even for half a day, and if more than 1 companies ask for pair programming exercise, that is more than a day commitment for the candidates to take off from their current job. Or if we are in jobseeker market, like in NZ there is no influx of overseas developers due to pandemic, most candidates won't bother with long recruitment process when they get ridiculous offers from companies which are desperate for developers?

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Obviously when one is taking part in a market, you will need to react to 'market conditions'. I don't intend to be dogmatic here. I'd have to decide wether I wanted to take the chance on this untested candidate. Let's be clear, I have done that lots of times, you can't always do the pairing thing, sometimes for the reasons that you mention.

[@vlogarithm9886]

Still, 99.999999% will ask you "How Hashmap internally works" 🤣

[@Yulrag]

My answer would be something along the lines, I can google it for you. Seriously, I don't need to know this, if don't need to modify it.

[@lakrinmex8132]

Guessing: using 2 arrays, 1 for values and 1 for the hash of each key and making index of both key and value being same so you can get the index from first array to retrieve the value from second array? Although IDK an easy way of getting the index of value in a normal array. Checking source of Hashmap in Java... Edit: The Java implementaion is far away from what I thought. It uses a tree datastructure to hold the objects of Node type which contains key value and hash of key. whenever you 'get' and value it searches through tree to retrieve it. So, it is very slow. better reimplement the interface yourself if you need :)

[@MartinsTalbergs]

"I would google that" is a good answer. Maybe a bit careless. The name itself "hashmap" answers this. There is a hashing function that creates unique hashes for keys. Then structure maps them to places in memory (likely in heap). This implementation may differ from language to language.

[@georgehelyar]

I had to ask this as an interviewer for a while because we had some awful, meddling management consultants change our interview process while they were there after we got bought by a VC. The correct answer is basically any sentence with the word "buckets" in it, but if you are implementing this yourself, you're doing it wrong. I want to know if you can use it correctly, not if you can make it from scratch. They also made us ask one of those stupid brain teaser puzzles on the phone interview, about orange and blue balls, that told us absolutely nothing about the candidate, and almost nobody got the answer to unless they had heard it before. As soon as they left we stopped doing that rubbish but I felt bad for the candidates who had to endure it. Now we make them do a coding test to judge their problem solving skills and knowledge of basic .NET features like collections and concurrency, and if we like their code, we do an in person (well, zoom for now) interview where we just talk. We ask them to describe an interesting problem they had to solve on a previous project, and how they solved it. What they would do differently if they had to do it again, etc. One of the main things I'm personally looking out for is a focus on quality. A lot of candidates we see right now (due to UK tax changes) are bodge it and scarper ex contractors who got paid a lot to write unmaintainable code and then left, thinking they did a great job, then ask for contractor money for a permanent role even though they can't write tests. One of the main things I look for on a CV is someone who tends to stay in the same job for a few years.

[@AbhijithVMohan]

But a high level description of this is covered in basic computer science classes, so if a job expects a cs degree or equivalent experience, what's wrong with asking this?