Software Engineering Interview Checklist - A series
Reading time : 4 minutes
Day 2/30
Disclaimer : I am not claiming that what I write in this post is the absolute truth, that all interviews look the same or ask the same questions. This is a culmination of my experience through all the interviews I have given. Please take all of the notes below with a pinch of salt but I hope they help you like they helped me in the process. :)
I started writing this very ambitious post this morning - I had my cup of coffee, notes in my Leuchtturm 1917 (I am an old school, pen&paper kinda gal in some aspects), deep focus music on Spotify playing on my headphones as I typed away. After a point of time, I realized two things:
Doing justice to this post in a few hours in a day is impossible. 🤯
Interviewing is a long, all-consuming process and talking about it in one single post will make me skip details in order to keep the reading-time of this post within the attention span limit of a normal person
And since I have now decided to put all of my heart and soul into this anyway, I want to do this right. Not doing it for the sake of just doing it. So this post is now a series. What comes after is Part 1 of a 5-part series of posts on ‘my’ Software Engineering Interview Process.
Summer is approaching fast. Many of us are starting summer internships, a bunch of us are preparing for full-time interviews. The best part of being in the tech industry is that hiring happens all year round; the worst part of being a student is that we are only able to make use of a small part of that entire year to score a position we like. I understand it is a difficult time for everyone graduating school this year, whether in May or in December (I am one of them), but it is important to keep the faith and keep doing the work.
As students, when we start thinking about Software Engineering interviews, the first few questions that come to mind are :
What kind of questions will I get?
Will I get quizzed on my resume?
What are the top 10 algorithms that this company likes to ask during interviews?
Do they ask theoretical questions?
I could go on, but this is where I am getting to:
The entire mindset gets so focussed on the “questions in the interview” that we forget to look at the big picture - interviewing is a process. The cliche says, “Interviewing is a marathon, not a sprint.” And I could not agree more. As I gave more and more interviews, with companies of all sizes and from all different industries, I started seeing a common trend in the whole process. Once I was able to decode it and make my peace with it, my attitude towards interviewing changed and helped me be successful. Not only that, I was able to get over the anxiety associated with giving these interviews. By the end of my marathon, I wasn’t breathless or reaching out for air, in fact, I glided past the finish line. (Well, that is an exaggeration of course, but makes the metaphor sound cool so I decided to keep it.)
In this series of posts, my aim is to share, what in my opinion was my “pipeline” for internship interviews that helped me get offers not only from Microsoft and Flatiron Health, but also Morgan Stanley, Cisco, Visa, Intuit and others. Since all of these companies were of different sizes, and targeting all different consumer markets, I think it is okay to generalize and say that most of these steps will work well for any company. In my opinion, the software engineering interview process can be classified into 4 different (big-picture) steps:
Preparing
Reaching Out
Actual Interviewing
Negotiating
All of these steps overlap with other but it is easier to see them as disjoint in the beginning for a better understanding, and then let the paths merge as you get more and more comfortable with the process. I am hoping this post can be a prologue to individual posts about each of these steps in the pipeline and give you a sense of some of the topics that I will dive deeper into in the coming days and weeks. Once I am done, I will also make sure to link them here in specific sections so this post can serve as a general guiding post, if you will.
Please leave a like & a comment if you like this post and let me know what you’d like to see on this website. It will help me make content better suited to the needs of the people visiting. If you have specific questions about any part of the process, drop them here as well!
