Notes on the Behavioral Aspect of Technical Interviews
My notes from Mayuko Inoue's video on what most people get wrong about technical interviews.
Overview
Here are some notes I took while watching Mayuko’s video on the behavioral aspect of technical interviews.
Interview Process
- Phone Screen
- Technical Interview
- On-site interview
The Behavioral Side
- The behavioral assessment that happens during the technical portion of the interview
- One of the first mistakes people make during the technical interview is they start to code right away
- Analogy: Imagine you hired a contractor to build a new deck in your backyard and they immediately start tearing things apart without asking any questions
- When approaching a new problem, you should explore the bounds of the problem
- Ask a bunch of questions
- Start with pseudo code
- You can work through your logic and your solution without getting bogged down in implementation-specific details
- Let’s you check in with your interviewer
- The most important part of a technical interview is to see how you think and approach problems
- You need to be able to explain your solution and approach
- Don’t go into unnecessary detail
- Explain concisely
- See if you can explain it in layman’s terms
- Pull up a practice problem and record yourself working through the problem and explaining the solution
- The technical interviewers will often be the people you end up working with
- The role of the interviewer is to come prepared with a prompt and witness you as an engineer do your work
- Ask your interviewer questions about direction
- Imagine they are a collaborator
- confirm you are going in the right direction
- is it safe to assume for the problem that a given condition will always be true
- When things get contentious on whether a company accepts someone for a role, it is always the behavioral side that makes the call
- Do you produce code that is easy to reason about?
- Do you think about how other people are going to use the code?
- Are you able to explain concepts that you know to help make other members on your team better engineers
- Are you a respectful and kind collaborator that people would like to work with?
- You still need to study up on data structures, algorithms and system design questions
- record yourself solving problems
- study with a friend
- do a mock interview
- Think about the kind of engineer, problem solver, and teammate you want to be
References:
- mayuko Video: What most people get wrong about technical interviews