My experience in how to be better in Job Interviews
Life is getting crazy, and I don’t know how weeks are passing so fast! I wrote 6 months ago about the steps that I took to be able to find a job in Germany.
Finally, in this 🌧 Saturday I found the time to share some tips that I learned during my job interviews.
My journey started from AWS Summit in Berlin. In the startup section, Jimdo was promoting their company and job vacancies. I gave it a shot and applied as a Golang Backend Engineer. I had my first code challenge! It was a bit scary; I wanted to show “all” my knowledge in a mini project. [Unfortunately, I cannot share the details of the project] But you could have realized, what are they looking for…
- Design patterns
- APIs Design
- Documentation Skills
In a week I got a call to have HR and Technical interview (at the same time). I would say the HR interview was pretty straight forward. It had the typical questions that everyone is expecting… something like:
- Tell me a little about yourself
- How big is your current team
- What was your responsibilities in your previous job
- Why do you want this job
- Describe your “Monday” routine at work
- Why are you looking for a new Job
- Why you don’t want to pursue further studies
- Tell me about a challenge or conflict you’ve faced at work and how you dealt with it
- Describe your Best/Worst Working Experience
- How do you define yourself [ seniority level ] (Junior | Mid |Senior )
The technical interview was more focused on what I studied in my Masters and what technologies I’m using in my current company/project [ back then PrehCarConnect ] . When I was naming the courses, randomly I was asked some Computer Science fundamentals…
Long story short I did not make it 😔 to the next round [ Which would have been spending a day at the company and my potential team ].
Here I summarized the technical questions that I was asked in all these interviews:
Architecture Design/System Design
- Design Uber
- Design WhatsApp
- Design Pizza Delivery Website
In this type of questions, it’s super important to split the problem into smaller “sub-problems” and then start solving them. It’s important to think about possible challenges in such a this large scale applications:
- Core Components of the system
- The high amount of load (Load Balancing)
- Latency optimization (Due to Global customers: Cross Data Center Replication)
- Ensuring High Availability
I studied these type of questions from Youtube:
Distributed Systems
- Differences between Services and Micro-Services
- Monolithic architecture vs Micro-Services
Languages/Technologies
- What is Docker, name Pros and Cons of it
- Docker containers vs Docker images
- Why we should use Golang
- Most used function in HTTP Package in Golang
- Why use or not use Go HTTP client
- What is serializing and deserializing
- When you do not use language XXX ( In my case Golang )
- Why Functional Programming
Testing
- What are benefits of having tests
- Integration test vs Unittest
- What is table driven test
General
- What do you consider during code reviews.
- Authorization vs Authentication.
- What is 2 Factor Authentication? Give an example
- Why should we use HTTPS?
- What is SSL?
- How do you decide what type of database should be used?
- What is API versioning ?
- What is the definition of a good API?
Code Challenges
This is the tricky part… I would say it really depends on what type of position you are applying, also how Junior or Senior you are.
But in general, It’s more about the Way You Think.
My code challenges were mainly playing with an array of strings or integers to find some patterns.
The best way to practice is solving a couple of questions on Coding Challenge Websites.
Tips
- Don’t forget to have a Smile 😊 on your face during the interview sessions.
- Don’t panic 🤯 when you face a problem which you have no idea how to solve it… Thinking out loud may help.
- Honesty is always the best idea.
Are you ready to apply for your Dream Job 💼?
Share the answers to the questions mentioned above and lets see who gives a better answer!
