How to Prepare for Technical Interviews

"Hard training makes for an easy battle"

Many years ago when I worked at Google, I would share a blog post created by Steve Yegge that was for candidates to help them prepare for their interviews. If you have not read it, go read it. If you have, go read it again.  The tips Yegge lists are very good for any interviewee. 

I have paraphrased parts of these posts and added some more context below:

Resume:

The objective of the resume is to get the recruiter / hiring manager on the phone.  

We are eager to know all of your past accomplishments, but believe it can be presented on one page. Straightforward facts and consolidated bullet points on a resume are easiest to read and sure to capture a recruiter’s attention. We love social media and the various technologies that allow us to research prospective employees. Include links to your github, linkedin, twitter, blog etc.

Skills on your resume are fair game. If your resume says "expert in scala/ruby etc," we will try to schedule you with a proven expert in scala/ruby, so be prepared. If you are not, leave it off. I would rather have a short list of the things you are awesome at than a resume with pages of everything you have ever done.

Also, dont be afraid to get creative! Times New Roman is wonderful, but we appreciate different fonts, formats and styles to showcase your greatness.

Phone call with the recruiter:

Recruiters want to hear about your background, what you have worked on and at what level of detail. 

We want to find your motivation for leaving your current position/company.  We want to find out what interests you in our company. 

We highly recommend that you do your research on the company prior to our call.  Above all, impress us with your knowledge of the company and why you want to work here - do your homework!

Phone call with the hiring manager / engineer on the team:

For phone screens, this is critical - make sure you are in a quiet place with a good internet connection. Headphones are handy if you are required to start writing code otherwise you will look like a nerdy T Rex trying to code and hold the phone.

Prior to your phone call, practice writing code in a simple text editor without syntax highlighting or completion macros. We use Coderpad during phone interviews at Zendesk but not every company uses these types of tools. The key is to not let little surprises throw you off your stride during the interview.

Brush up on techniques that you may not use every day, but are very useful when you need them: recursion, graph theory, tree traversal, etc. You might be asked to implement some well known library functions. Knowing at least a little bit about how things work under the hood is highly recommended.

Review tech talks, engineering blog posts etc to get a feel for how the company for which you are applying are doing things and the scale of problems they are trying to solve.

Impress the engineers with your mastery of whatever language is most comfortable for you. Dont use a language you barely know because its trendy or you think it will please the interviewer. This is a very common pitfall.

Onsite Interviews:

The onsite interview is an opportunity for your potential team to get to know more about you, your background and experience, and why you want to work at the company. Depending on the role you will be asked a breadth of questions both technical, behavioral etc.

For technical related questions, a good skill to cultivate is the ability to change your point of view at will. Sometimes you will encounter a problem that seems like it should have an elegant solution, but in fact must be brute forced. If you are stuck on a problem, try to think of any way to solve it, no matter how clumsy or inefficient. Then improve on it. Getting something that works is better than nothing.

Ask questions!!!!  Take advantage of the time to ask your interviewer about working life at the company, how the company is organized, what its like working there or really anything at all. At Zendesk, we want candidates who can see themselves seated in our event space during a Town Hall, with a burrito and chips/salsa.  Always remember that you are also interviewing the team/company/role etc as much as the other way around.