A Story About Preparing Technical Interviews

Recently, I was assigned to prepare the technical interviews for my current company, and the preparation of these interviews was quite a fun to share. One thing to emphasize right at the beginning of this article, I didn't bother mentioning how to test out the guy's personality etc, because that's the job of the HR and managers and it's not related to the topic.

Basically, we need to hire 2 more developers in our team, 1 junior backend dev and 1 senior frontend dev: and we need to test their technical skills.

Being a developer myself, I totally understand the pressure it could give by asking questions like: Tell the complexity of Bubble Sort / Describe the DFS during a job interview. No one would truly remember this by heart (at least I don't and I'm not proud of it) unless you can deduce this with your strong math skills or you prepare the answer before going to the interview the day before. However, in order to get the job, you need to get prepared.

Here is the thing: if you want to stand out among the other candidates, you have to prove that you got the basics covered. Put the communication and interpersonal skills aside (they're as much important as technical skills just to make it clear), as a job applicant you need to show what you got in a limited time, and the last thing you want is making the interviewers think you lied in your resume.

Back to the main topic, I started by dividing the interview into 2 parts: Oral test and Written test, both worth 50 points hence 100 points in total. It's always nice to start the meeting with a few friendly questions about the industry to get to know the person, and also to lighten the mood and make him/her relaxed.

While I was preparing the questions for the oral test, an idea just came up to my mind: how would I choose the random questions? Apparently, I can manually pick up random questions from each category, then add up the points together and try to get a sum of 50. But I'm lazy. As a developer, we tend to think about making a program to solve the problem even it could turn out to be an overkill :)

Without too much hesitation the spec of the program is formed in my head: A technical interview questions generator, which can pick up random X questions from Y categories that worth Z points in total, then print the results out into a PDF file.

For the sake of simplicity, all the questions are hardcoded in a static class, and the program is published as a ClickOnce application in .NET Framework.

The source code is available on Github and the application will be presented in another post. 

Now I'm happy that I don't need to do the maths every time before going to an interview and I can say that as an interviewer, I am prepared.