Daniel's Blog

Successful Engineering Interviews

5 min read | Last Updated: July 01, 2020

I prepared a lot for this interview but I’m still feeling pretty nervous. The meeting room seems very nice and I got offered some water. The interviewers, Alex and Taylor, give me a very short intro and they ask me to give mine. No follow up questions, odd. And they are staring at their laptops all the time, are they taking notes?

The question seems like a tricky variation of a binary search problem so I explain my reasoning and get started. Alex just says OK…I hope this is the right answer.

I think I’m done, so I go through the edge cases and say so. Taylor looks at the whiteboard and mentions there is a typo. OK, I fix it. Alex then says there’s an error on the code but nothing else.

I managed to figure it out! I fix the edge case, go through a few more cases and I’m happy with it. The interviewers say OK, and then they just ask if I have any questions. I ask a few about how it is working there but I get really short answers…do they want to be here?

Huh, I actually passed the interview, I thought they didn’t like me at all! But do I want to work there? Probably not…

What happened?

Sam didn’t accept the offer! Why not? Let’s go through a summary of the interview:

Round of introductions.
Present the problem.
Solve the problem while explaining the reasoning.
Tweak solution to fix edge cases.
Let the candidate ask questions.

There’s nothing wrong with it, right? The interviewers followed up the standard “how-to” interviewing.

Let’s unpack a bit more.

Alex and Taylor didn’t look engaged or motivated at all. That could be because they didn’t feel like interviewing at that moment (bad: Is Sam not worthy of their attention?) or that they are very unhappy (worse: They don’t even like the company!). Furthermore, those culture questions had more impact on Sam’s decision than anything the recruiter could have said.

What do we want from engineering interviews?

When we interview someone we want to achieve two things:

Assess the candidate skills and culture fit. Convince them to join the team. A lot of companies focus most of the efforts on the first one and not on the second. Which one to focus on? (Hint: both)

Assessing the skills and fit of the candidate in a fair manner is not easy. There are plenty of hot topics regarding the content of the interview but no matter what, the process needs to be fair, repeatable and with low false positive rates.

Sam above could have ended being stuck on the “unknown” problem and failing the interview. My take on this is that helping the candidate in an indirect way (i.e asking good questions) is not affecting the fairness of the process. Alex should have asked some open questions to nudge Sam towards the possible problem. Don’t we expect the candidates to work as part of a team?

Now that we have assessed the candidate we want to convince them to join the team. What does your company have that any of the other tech companies don’t? Assuming money is not a problem (and there are plenty of surveys that show that is not always the top priority), you can offer them cool problems to solve and a great company culture. If you think “we have a great culture and colleagues”, show it by having engaged engineers that are happy to be there!

Interviewing is important, and you are not the main character

When you interview someone, you need to learn how to “work” with a complete stranger and solve something together, get a sense of how you would work with that person and also give a glimpse of your day to day work. That’s an amazing set of skills, and should be cultivated. That said, interviewing is also a huge responsibility because you are a representing your company.

I’ve seen people trying to compare themselves with the candidate, to see who is better. That’s a big no-no for me, and it might take some time before they get on the rotation again. It’s not about the interviewers, it’s about the candidate.

A few years ago, I wasn’t very happy at my job so I asked the talent team to take me out of the rota. I didn’t feel I could act as a company ambassador in good conscience.

Setting up for success

This is what an engaging and empathetic interview looks like:

Round of introductions where they get to meet each other.
Present the problem.
The candidate solves the problem with help from questions or being challenged on approach.
Engaging conversation where the company learns about the interviewers and the team.

Here’s my secret: I want all candidates to absolutely nail the interview. That doesn’t mean I’m going to “cheat” and help them too much, but I’m gonna be happier if a candidate does really well than if not, regardless of which team.

It’s all about setting people up for success.

Bonus: The story in the beginning is gender neutral, how did you picture it in your head?

Written by Daniel Lopez Rovira who likes talking about engineering stuff.