It’s best if you can do some prep for the interview. Try to understand what the company’s product is. It’s amazing how cryptic a web site can be, especially if it’s enterprise software in some industry you don’t know. Still, make an attempt, and ask about anything that’s confusing. The fact that you’ve understood some basic things about their product, and that you want to understand more, will set you apart. Of course, it will also help you understand what you’d be doing if you worked there.
Then you should try to read up on the sorts of questions people like to ask. For some reason, people ask algorithms questions far out of proportion to how often they come up in an actual job. Pick up a copy of The Algorithm Design Manual
and read the first section (chapters 1-10) during lunch or in the evening. Even if you only get half way through, you’ll be better prepared than most.
The interview is lopsided: you’ll spend almost all your time answering their questions and only have a little time to ask yours. That’s ok. If you’re still uncertain after the reverse phone screen and the in-person interview, you can always ask to talk to someone on the phone another day.
Keep in mind that they’re trying to figure out whether to hire you. So while it’s good to mention how great this job would be for you, you want to emphasize how great you would be at this job. They don’t really care that you’ve always wanted to learn Lisp and this job would let you do so. They care that you can design & implement software, quickly understand complexity, etc. With that in mind, ask yourself “what are they really trying to get at with this question?” For example, if they ask about a particular job on your resume, feel free to say that another job is probably more relevant and ask them if they’d rather hear about that.
Generally you’ll meet 5-6 people for an hour each, and there are two great questions you should ask everyone. After the initial small talk, ask “What does someone need to be really successful at this position?” Not only will many interviewers think this is a good question for a candidate to ask, but they’ll tell you what they’re looking for. For the rest of the hour, when answering questions, try to answer with stuff related to what they’re looking for. Also, write down the answer. You’ll want to refer to it much later when you’re trying to decide between the different places you interviewed at.
Save the second question for near the end of the hour. “What is the best and worst thing about working at X?” Again, you should write down the answer, because you’ll have 5 or 6 of them from every company you interview at. Both the best and worst thing are important to consider.
Beyond that, here are some good questions to ask:
What are the day-to-day tasks I’d have?
What day-to-day tasks do you typically do? What have you been doing over the past month?
For a manager:
These were covered in the Reverse Phone Screen post.
For the tech lead:
How is scheduling done? How are estimates and deadlines created?
How are tasks divided up among programmers?
Who does the overall design/architecture?
Who does the design/architecture of individual contributor’s tasks?
How much time do leads spend with their programmers?
Do you do code reviews? How are they done?
How much do you look over people’s check ins?
Good luck, and try to be relaxed and friendly. But most of all, focus on the technical puzzles they give you. If you got into programming because you enjoy that kind of puzzle solving, hopefully the puzzles will at least be interesting.
Once you’ve sent out resumes, you’ll hopefully get a few people interested in phone screening you. You’re really best off if you prepare for these and for the in-person interview. Get a relevant textbook and start reading it in the evenings or on your lunch break. People seem to love algorithms questions, so get a copy of The Algorithm Design Manual and read the first few chapters. For my Endeca interview, I started reading Introduction to Information Retrieval. I got through about 5 chapters of it, and one of the interviewers started quizzing me on it. When I answered all the questions without thinking, he said “I’m trying to see how you do on a problem that you don’t already know the answer to, so let’s switch to something else.” Still, I’m sure it reflected well that I knew my Information Retrieval stuff.
The phone screen is for them to decide whether or not to bring you in for an in-person interview, and you want to help them with that decision. So you’ll spend most of your time answering their questions. You should ask a few questions of your own, but don’t spend more than 5 or 10 minutes on that.
However, once you hear that you passed the phone screen, you should do a reverse phone screen: before you schedule the in-person interview, ask to talk to the person who will be your manager if you join. Or you could ask for a tech lead, if you those are the sorts of issues that you care more about. For managers, my favourite questions are:
What’s your management philosophy? This is so open ended that it can be hit or miss, but with the right person it can be really insightful. Plus it gets them thinking, which will help them answer the later questions. Then ask What’s company X’s management philosophy? as an individual’s style may not represent the culture of the company as a whole. Some good follow up questions are What management books would you recommend? What do you like & don’t like about each one?
How do you figure out what to promise to the customer and when to promise it? There’s a sad truth about software process: It’s impossible to estimate exactly how long a feature will take to build. Even half way through the project, most organizations are off by up to a factor of 4. So, if they promise a fixed set of features on a fixed date more than a month or two away, you’ll probably end up being stressed and working crazy hours to deliver, and then the deadline will be pushed back anyway.
Do you use an Agile development process? Why or why not? What specific processes do you use? Whether you like Agile or not, you should know what you’re getting into. Also, it’s amazing how many people say “yes we do [insert buzzword here]” but when you question them on it, they don’t understand it at all. I had the CTO of a 500 person company tell me they didn’t use Scrum because it was a heavyweight process involving Gantt charts.
When an urgent task is supposed to take two days for a task, and half way through the second day the developer says “I don’t think I can finish it today,” how do you respond? I’ve been in this situation and had my boss just look at me, with a serious look on his face, and say “It has to be done today.” So now it still isn’t going to be done today, but its somehow my fault.
When a developer is working hard but not getting far, how do you notice? It’s actually quite tricky to know how productive a developer is. Some developers pile on the quick hacks, so it looks like they’re making lots of progress. On closer inspection, their code is full of bugs, and incredibly difficult to understand, debug or extend. If you don’t have design reviews, code reviews, and/or QA from the start, this can slip by until you think you’re almost ready to ship. Other developers keep up on the latest technologies, and are able to say “this is a known problem, let’s use X for it rather than inventing our own version of it.” But more directly, if you don’t have a detailed schedule, then you don’t know whether you’re behind schedule. So dig into it. When do they do QA? Who looks over the check ins? What about people who don’t just code up the first thing that comes to mind, but spend a little time looking for a better way?
Once you notice, what do you do?
Here are three developer personalities from a post on Reddit. I think they do a great job of describing personalities I’ve seen. What role, if any, would they have in your company?
Coder: values velocity. Wants to “produce code” and “get things done.” They are proud of working hard, staying late, generating thousands of lines of code, and of knowing dozens of obscure APIs by heart because they type them in all the time. They’re great on anything that’s a clown fight of interacting APIs, like LAMP stacks or AJAX apps. However, they won’t produce a memory allocator that you’d want to use as anything but a prank.
Programmer: values correctness. Wants to “solve problems” and “do it right.” They are proud of working efficiently, being caught up enough that they don’t have to stay late, and deleting code. They’re good at algorithmic code like a memory allocator.
Researcher: values knowledge. Wants to “find problems” and “publish.” They are proud of producing new knowledge, and sharing it. They don’t stay late at all.
Also, what do their career paths look like?
What’s the right level of pressure for your developers? In other words, should projects be slightly under staffed? Should deadlines be aggressive?
In practice, how many hours a week do people typically work? You can ask this near the end of the interview, although hopefully not as the last thing. Asking it earlier may make it seem like you care more about leaving on time then on getting the job done.
Can you give me an example of someone under you who has worked to improve their skills? For example learning new software, going to conferences, etc. What’s the right amount of time for someone to spend improving their skills?
Do you do anything to explicitly identify “best practices”? Do you adopt best practices from outside your company? Can you give me an example of a practice or two you’ve adopted? You want to see if they learn from their mistakes, and the mistakes of others.
What’s the best and worst thing about working at X? Both the best and worst are worth paying attention to.
For a tech lead, see the list of questions in my next post, about the in-person interview.
The big advantage of the reverse phone screen is that it’s quick. No one will miss you if you’re not at your desk for an hour, so you can do a lot of them. In-person interviews are half a day to a full day, so you have to take some PTO time for them. By doing reverse phone screens, you can consider many more companies than you normally would.
I’ve changed jobs a bunch of times over the last few years, and now I’ve found one I’m going to stick with for quite a while. So I thought I’d write up the tricks and tips I’ve learned for anyone in a similar situation.
The first thing to do is figure out what you want. You might think this is easy, or that you already know. But as I took job after job that seemed good then turned out bad, I realized that the stuff I thought was important wasn’t really important, and other things I wasn’t even considering were essential. I’ve noticed that, as people progress through their careers, they often start by focusing only on the technologies (”I want to work on cool stuff!”) and, over time, realize that compatibility with their boss and co-workers as more important.
So for every job you’ve had, write down a detailed list of everything you liked and didn’t like about it. Think back to every project you worked on, and every person you’ve worked with. What did you like about them? What did you dislike? Did you learn something new? When things didn’t work out, did your boss help or just put pressure on you? When you made suggestions, did your boss give you good reasons for not following them? Think about each of your co-workers. When did you enjoy interacting with them, and when was there friction?
I’ve come to realize that “process” is the only “must have” aspect of a job for me. I can’t be happy in a “get a lot of good people and set aggressive deadlines” place. I feel ownership of the project, not just my part but the whole thing. When I’m forced to create spaghetti code that is then full of bugs and takes forever to extend, when I’m forced to work crazy hours but can only produce shippable code very slowly because of the spaghetti, it bugs me. I take the failure personally.
Another thing I’ve learned is that job ads are almost useless. They tell you what technologies you’ll be working on, and they always say the company is great, but nothing about what your day to day work will be like. How much politics and bureaucracy? How much overtime? If you come up with a clever solution to a problem, will people be happy & let you implement it? Or will they give you blank looks and consider you weird?
Whether you prosper under a sane process, cutting edge work, or perks (massages and free snacks!), the job ad won’t tell you. Recruiters might help if you find a really good one that takes the time to understand what you’re looking for. They’re rare, but they’re out there.
So you might be tempted to do a shotgun approach: send your resume to every job that isn’t completely out of the question. But that’s a bad idea. The people reading your resume are sifting through hundreds of them for every open position. The way to stand out is to tailor your resume to them, and that takes time.
So in the end, the way I find positions is:
Talk to friends, see if they know of anything. If you don’t need to keep your search a secret, you can post on Linked In/Facebook/Twitter that you’re looking for a job and would like suggestions.
Look at lists of “best places to work,” such as the Boston Globe’s or the Boston Business Journal’s. Of course, they may have a different definition of “good place” than you do, but that’s ok, we’re just getting a list of candidates. We’ll look at all of them more closely soon.
Search indeed.com and simplyhired.com for jobs that look interesting. This won’t tell you about their culture, but you’ll filter for that later.
Work with a really good recruiter.
Before you send out any resumes, try to narrow down the list. Find the company on Linked In and see if you’re connected to anyone who works there. If so, chat with them on the phone. Ask:
What’s the best and worst thing about working at X? How many hours do people actually work per week? How much time is spent bug fixing? Does your boss have a technical background? How do you come up with schedules and release dates? How do you decide what to promise to customers and when?
and anything else that’s important to you. Also look for people who have left the company in the last few years and talk to them.
When sending out the resume, make sure you tailor it to the type of company. I usually have two resumes, one that emphasizes my machine learning/AI background, and another emphasizing my general programming skills. I also tailor each cover letter to the company. You’d be amazed how many cover letters are so generic that they don’t even mention the company’s name. If you mention the requirements from the job ad, you’ll set yourself apart. And you should also “connect the dots,” describing how things from your background relate to the requirements. Hiring managers have to sort through hundreds of resumes, so they’re really skimming each one, and may not see the connections you’ve seen. Your cover letter should be a “cheat sheet.”
When you send out your first resume, a clock starts ticking. If they like you, they’ll want a phone screen, then an in-person interview, then make you an offer, and want you to accept. If you try to delay it while you search for other opportunities, they’ll take that as lack of excitement and it may hurt your chances. So make sure you’ve found your list and narrowed it down as much as possible before you send out resumes or contact a recruiter. Then, send them to all companies on your list at the same time and contact recruiters that day.
I got through about 5 chapters of it, and one of the interviewers started quizzing me on it. When I answered all the questions without thinking, he said “I’m trying to see how you do on a problem that you don’t already know the answer to, so let’s switch to something else.” Still, I’m sure it reflected well that I knew my Information Retrieval stuff.