Surviving your first technical interview inquisition: tips, tricks & live demos
In support of Green River College’s Bachelor’s in Software Development and as a way to increase community engagement around all things web and mobile, faculty members Tina Ostrander, Ken Hang, and yours truly co-founded Kent Station Web & Mobile Developers on Meetup.com on this day one year ago.
The meetup, which convenes once a month at Green River’s Kent Station campus, brings guest speakers from leading technology companies and provides a stage for students to give technical talks. It’s good fun, and a great way to create dialogue between up-and-coming students and experienced developers.
Our April 14th meetup — “Surviving Your First Technical Interview Inquisition: Tips, Tricks & Live Demos” — was devoted to the technical interview process. Agile XP Developer and Technical Coach Garrick West facilitated an interactive workshop around interviewing best practices. Over 65 attendees turned out, including students from 6 different local colleges.
In hour one, West selected participants from the audience to try mock whiteboarding exercises like one might encounter in a real-life technical interview. In one whiteboarding exercise, West-as-Interviewer asked a participant to hand-code a small program. In another, he posed a more open-ended question around object-oriented design. After each exercise, West provided feedback and offered tips for improvement. Audience members, meanwhile, followed along with paper and pencil, hand-writing their own solutions to each whiteboarding problem.
In hour two, West conducted a short mock interview with one brave student volunteer (no easy task in front of a large audience). The ensuing discussion hit upon a wide variety of topics including common interviewing questions, techniques for salary negotiation, and attire recommendations.
West concluded the workshop by offering a parting list of best practices. Standouts from his “tips for success,” paraphrased below, include:
- When given a whiteboarding problem, write down the requirements, step back, stop and think, and talk aloud. Don’t be afraid to ask the interviewer clarifying questions. And assume there are traps.
- Practice popular problems on a regular basis using a whiteboard and a timer, and with friends. There’s a variety of resources to work from such as “Cracking The Coding Interview” by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.
- Keep in mind that whiteboarding is all about how you solve problems. In other words, it’s an exercise that is meant to illustrate a thought process and not a way to demonstrate that you know everything.
- At the end of an interview, if you have the opportunity to ask a question, look your interviewer in the eye and ask, “Why do you like working here?” The response you get might help you decode the culture of your potential future employer.
- Most importantly, remember that whiteboarding and interviewing are skills in and of themselves, and as such, they require frequent practice. We learn by doing!
“Surviving Your First Technical Interview Inquisition” demystified the inner-workings of the technical interview by providing students with a space to take risks (i.e. participate in a whiteboarding exercise or mock interview) without real-world consequences. West’s dynamic approach also created opportunities for active, hands-on learning with meta-reflection built-in every step of the way.
All in all, the event was a tremendous success, reaffirming the power of Meetup.com to create community and equip students with practical career skills. At Green River College, an active presence on the platform is a key ingredient to our playbook for shaping a new generation of software developers.
