How to Prepare for Interviews at Technology Companies
Adria Saracino is the head of outreach at Distilled, an Internet marketing firm. When not consulting on content and PR strategy, you can find her writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet. Follow Adria @adriasaracino.
If you think the best thing you can do to prepare for an interview with a technology company is to memorize brainteasers, like Google’s, “Why are manhole covers round,” think again. In the height of their popularity, tech interview brainteasers were meant to test a candidate’s reasoning ability, overall intelligence, and ability to keep cool when thrown off guard. But as a whole, the major technology companies are moving away from these types of questions.
“The reason is twofold,” says Gayle Laakmann McDowell, former Google, Microsoft, and Apple engineer and author of Cracking the Coding Interview. “One is that a lot of brainteasers rely on this ‘aha moment,’ where you suddenly get what the question is about. That becomes too random. There’s no reason to ask a brainteaser if it has nothing to do with computer science when you can ask one that tests both intelligence and knowledge of computer science.”
What’s more, adds McDowell — who interviewed more than 120 people in her work at Google — as books and blogs picked up on the novel brainteaser questions, it became difficult to determine whether or not brainteasers were testing what they were designed to test: think-on-your-feet reasoning skills. Here’s how these companies are approaching the interview process now.
What Kind of Questions You Should Expect
There are generally three types of interview questions:
1. Subject-specific brainteasers
2. Questions you’re likely to solve on the job
3. Questions with either multiple or no right answers
どのような質問を予測すべきか
一般的に、面接での質問は3種類に分けられる：
１．特定の課題に関する難問
２．仕事をしていく上で解決するであろう質問
３．複数の解答例が挙げられる、または正しい解答がない質問
どのような質問がされるのか
一般的に3種類の面接質問がある。
1. 明確なテーマをもつ頭の体操的難問
2. 仕事で解決する必要が出るであろう質問
3. 複数回答または正しい回答のない質問
When you do get brainteasers, they’re going to be subject-specific. Charles Caldwell, senior engineer manager at LogiXML, a dashboard reporting software company, revealed some of his company’s go-to questions:
“You’ve got a database of everyone in the world, how do you segment it into logical categories?”
Write a function that finds the next least number in a binary search tree based on an input value.”
“How would you crawl the internet?”
「世界中の人々のデータベースを持っているとして、どのようにして論理的な分類を行いますか？」
「入力値に基づいた2分探索樹で次に挙げられる可能性が最も低い数値を示す数式を書き出してください。」
「あなたはどのようにしてインターネット上でクロールしますか？」
These types of questions test the kind of logic, skills, and expertise candidates will need on the job, while still challenging them to step beyond their everyday fare.
Second, many tech companies now get so concrete they’ll actually test a candidate on questions they want them to solve on the job. One interviewee for a marketing firm was briefed on a project, given a list of five features the company wanted to implement, and asked to prioritize and explain his action list.
Third, and perhaps even more illuminating, can be the questions that either have no right answer or have more than one. These questions test creativity, showcasing how interviewees work through problems and engage with the process — all key capabilities in any leading tech firm. “I know I feel the pressure in interviews to have the optimal answer right off the bat and look like the golden boy,” explained an engineer at Microsoft who asked to remain anonymous. “But the irony there is that any optimal answer you’ve memorized beforehand doesn’t actually show the interviewer what you can do.”
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How Can You Mess Up
In answering these three main types of questions, there are a few common ways that interviewees consistently go awry. Many candidates, for instance, will tout a certain expertise and then struggle to demonstrate their skills in this area.
“I like to ask a candidate what technology they feel is their strongest competency and then drill very hard into that,” says Caldwell. “I will ask for specific examples in which they faced a challenging problem they needed to solve in that technology, how they did it, and why it was challenging or interesting. Too often, I get really bland answers that show the candidate is either relatively novice in the technology or has no ability to communicate the impact of the work they did.”
Another default reaction of many interviewees when they panic is to quickly admit they don’t know. No matter how flustered you are, do not give up so easily. Rather, talk through your thought process to at least show the interviewer how you approach roadblocks.
