When I was interviewing at Lightrun, they asked me how I would scale a specific system for production. How would you implement something like X? That’s something you can only do with experience. People need to describe the tools and techniques they used to track a bug. People might draw a blank here or might take a while to find something, but these are engaging stories, so they’re great for an interview. What was your process?Ī debugging story tells me more about a candidate than anything else. Tell me about the last big bug you tracked. If they don’t, it’s a serious warning sign. I love seeing people “geek out” on a project. By creating a discussion around this, I need to form a metal image of the project. What they can do better and what they learned. I want them to tell me what worked, what didn’t work. I want people who enjoy what they’re doing. Tell me about the last project you’re passionate about Great Technical Job Interviews Questionsīased on that, here are some of the best technical interview questions to ask in no particular order: He still must have recommended me for the job despite my clear, over inflated ego. I was sitting there and the only bug that came to mind was two days I spent looking for a problem because of a < sign pointing in the wrong direction… I can’t tell him THAT!Įventually I had to confess that I know I’m responsible for bugs… But my brain completely erased them from my mind. “I want to hear about something you made”. I started telling him about a bug I tracked, and he stopped me. The question was: “Tell me about a bug you made, how you tracked it and fixed it?”. Years later, I asked him about it and he totally forgot that… The 3rd one, Eran Davidov asked me a question that was one of the hardest questions I ever got in a technical interview. Sun Microsystems conducted interviews by using three separate engineers. The Hardest Technical Interview Question I Ever Got But debugging and dealing with issues is a skill you develop by doing. If you don’t know a library or API, you can learn it. If you don’t know a programming language, you can pick it up. ![]() If you did any real world programming, then you had bugs and you dealt with them. I care about programming experience, it can be in open source, university or elsewhere. ![]() I don’t care about programming experience in a specific company. I’ll start with the positive first, the things I ask… Debugging as a Technical Interview Technique When I tell this to people I get the knee jerk reaction of “so what the hell do you ask” or “why not X?”. Have three people conduct one-on-one interviews (separately).No ranking websites or hacker challenges.Obviously, I don’t want to hire a person who’s unreliable.This teammate should be a person I want to work with. When I conduct a technical interview, I’m hiring a teammate. Technical Interview questions should focus on things that are more relevant and not Googleable.Īfter reading these articles on the subject, I felt I needed to write something of my own that reflects my perspective on a good technical interview. ![]() Obviously, there’s a way to do this right (especially regarding IP) but if you’re testing something that’s Googlable then you’re testing the wrong skill. My wife is learning to code and confided in me that she's “cheating”. But this really reminded me of a tweet I read ages ago which unfortunately I can’t find… It went something like this: The candidate was googling answers and copying them into a shared screen, pretending this was his code. How the hell do you cheat in an interview?ĭoes Cyrano de Bergerac) whisper the answer from outside the camera? The headline caught my attention right away “ I was shocked to catch a candidate cheating in an online interview ”.
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