/Interview Advice

How You Can Tell If The Company You're Interviewing With Is Rotten On The Inside?

- Charity Majors tl;dr: Charity presents strategies, such as backchanneling with contacts, effective D&I practices, and also maintains that how the interview is organized is telling: (1) Was the interview conducted in a timely fashion? Were you given detailed information about what to expect? (2) Were you compensated for your any take-home projects. (3) Did they get back to you swiftly at each step of the way to let you know where you stand and what comes next?

featured in #293


The Big Tech Coding Interview Framework - Pt 1. Inspect

- Daniel Habib tl;dr: 1st in a 4 part series on how to approach every programming interview, regardless of topic, starting with a framework for how to inspect the problem at hand: "Did I explicitly state what the input was? Did I clarify what the desired output was? Did I construct a simple example that could be solved by hand?"

featured in #261


Advice For Tech Workers To Navigate The Most Heated Job Market Of All Time

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: More emphasis on total comp packages, seeing some companies move to one-year stock grants. Job seekers should optimize for happiness, identifying their "must-haves," and also have the opportunity to negotiate v hard. Employees can negotiate with current employers to improve their situation. Gergely also outlines how this is impacting more junior tech workers too. 

featured in #253


Reddit Interview Problems: The Game Of Life

- Alex Golec tl;dr: Alex runs through an interview question at Reddit: "Suppose you have an M by N board of cells, where each cell is marked as "alive" or "dead." This arrangement of the board is called the "state," and our task is to compute the cells in the next board state according to a set of rules:" He runs through the solutions in this post.

featured in #247


20 Questions A Software Engineer Should Ask When Joining A New Team

- Thomas Stringer tl;dr: Broken into 3 categories - Technical, Collaboration & External. Technical questions begin with: (1) How do I locally build the software? (2) How do I locally test the software? (3) How do I setup my development environment? (4) Where does the source code live? (5) Where is the CI/CD pipeline and how does it work?

featured in #246


Interview Advice That Got Me Offers From Google, Microsoft, And Stripe

- Zain Rizvi tl;dr: Zain covers: (1) How to use recruiters to your advantage. (2) Going to real interviews for practice (3) Being open to learning during interviews (4) Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting.

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Interviews.school

- Adilet Zhaxybay tl;dr: "The purpose is to help you prepare for software engineering interviews."

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The 40 Best Questions To Ask In An Interview — How To Go Deeper Than “What’s the Culture Like?”

tl;dr: Questions are divided into categories, such as Company Growth and Diversity. Examples of questions are "what are some of the key financial metrics that the company optimizes for? What is the title of the most senior underrepresented person at the company?"

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How to Spot Toxic Software Jobs From Their Descriptions

- Michael Vinh Xuan Thanh tl;dr: With real examples, Michael illustrates descriptions asking (1) developers to own more than one part of the development process (2) listing too many qualities for a junior level position (3) lacking clarity on the role.

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What I Learned From Doing 60+ Technical Interviews In 30 Days

- Uduak Obong-Eren tl;dr: Uduak guides through 13 things he's learned before, during and after interviews, such as how to handle introductory phone and technical phone calls, what to do when you’re stuck on a problem in the interview, and more.

featured in #199