Software Developer Interview Preparation as an Outline

There are many reasons for why you would want to prepare for interviews.

Maybe you are looking for a new job, or you might be looking for a switch to a better company, or maybe the company that you were working for got acquired, and the acquiring company wants to screen the incoming employees and lay off the ones who do not perform well in the interviews.

Assuming the best case, you already have a stable and satisfying job, and are preparing for interviews just for the sake of proactively preparing for the potential unexpected times of adversity in the future.

Whatever the case, In this article, I will lay out the basic structure or outline as to how you can plan out your interview preparation for the Software Developer or Software Engineer position, for a seamless interview experience.

According to me, the best way to look at software engineering interviews is to break the interview preparation process into four groups.

1. Technical interview preparation
2. Experience interview preparation
3. Human resource interview preparation
4. Company details interview preparation

Talking about the first group, in the technical interview preparation, you would want to focus on both the generics and the specifics.

By generics I mean the topics that are expected to be known by all software engineers, irrespective of their specialisation in a certain field.

In the generics, you need to have knowledge on competitive programming and strong hold on one programming language, you should be knowing about how to write clean code and how to structure projects in clean architectures, you should be knowing the basics of database management and writing database queries, you should have knowledge on how operating systems work, along with a basic overview of common tasks you may end up working on, like web development, backend development, data mining or scraping, etcetera.

In the specifics, you should know your specialisation field inside and out. For example, If I am applying for the position of an Android Developer, I should know all theoretical and practical aspects of how to make Android apps, as well as all the internals of the domain.

Coming to the second group, in the experience interview preparation, you should be ready with prepared answers on what was your role in your previous company and why that was important with examples, you should be able to speak about your personal projects and how much they have scaled with time or how popular the projects currently are, you should be able to talk about your achievements in your domain, for example, winning hackathons, owning certifications, etcetera.

Coming to the third group, in the human resource interview preparation, you should be able to speak confidently about yourself, your personal and professional goals, your expectations from the company profile, your professional experience, your responses on how you will handle the flexibility of pay, job relocation, etcetera.

Coming to the fourth group, in the company details interview preparation, you should be thoroughly aware about the company you are applying for, the projects that the company takes up, the technology stack the company deals with, the company history, company’s expectations for the job profile you are applying for, and most importantly, the data company’s past hiring process.

By analysing the data, you may get an idea of the expected pay around which you can negotiate your salary, as well as, you may be asked repeated questions or given repeat assignments as from the previous hiring process. You can easily access such data from websites like Glassdoor.

According to me, if you will also divide your interview preparation in these groups (and subgroups), it will become less frustrating and relatively easier to prepare for interviews.

I thank you for reading this article until the end.