How to Prepare for Interviews at Technology Companies

I think almost everybody today including me needs to learn something or everything from this. If you think the best thing you can do to prepare for an interview with a technology company is to memorize brainteasers, like Google’s, “Why are manhole covers round,” think again. In the height of their popularity, tech interview brainteasers were meant to test a candidate’s reasoning ability, overall intelligence, and ability to keep cool when thrown off guard. But as a whole, the major technology companies are moving away from these types of questions.

“The reason is twofold,” says Gayle Laakmann McDowell, former Google, Microsoft, and Apple engineer and author of Cracking the Coding Interview. “One is that a lot of brainteasers rely on this ‘aha moment,’ where you suddenly get what the question is about. That becomes too random. There’s no reason to ask a brainteaser if it has nothing to do with computer science when you can ask one that tests both intelligence and knowledge of computer science.”

What’s more, adds McDowell — who interviewed more than 120 people in her work at Google — as books and blogs picked up on the novel brainteaser questions, it became difficult to determine whether or not brainteasers were testing what they were designed to test: think-on-your-feet reasoning skills. Here’s how these companies are approaching the interview process now.

What kind of questions should you expect ?

There are generally three types of interview questions:

• 1. Subject-specific brainteasers
• 2. Questions you’re likely to solve on the job
• 3. Questions with either multiple or no right answers

When you do get brainteasers, they’re going to be subject-specific. Charles Caldwell, senior engineer manager at LogiXML, a dashboard reporting software company, revealed some of his company’s go-to questions:

• “You’ve got a database of everyone in the world, how do you segment it into logical categories?”
• Write a function that finds the next least number in a binary search tree based on an input value.”
• “How would you crawl the internet?”

These types of questions test the kind of logic, skills, and expertise candidates will need on the job, while still challenging them to step beyond their everyday fare.

Second, many tech companies now get so concrete they’ll actually test a candidate on questions they want them to solve on the job. One interviewee for a marketing firm was briefed on a project, given a list of five features the company wanted to implement, and asked to prioritize and explain his action list.

Third, and perhaps even more illuminating, can be the questions that either have no right answer or have more than one. These questions test creativity, showcasing how interviewees work through problems and engage with the process — all key capabilities in any leading tech firm. “I know I feel the pressure in interviews to have the optimal answer right off the bat and look like the golden boy,” explained an engineer at Microsoft who asked to remain anonymous. “But the irony there is that any optimal answer you've memorized beforehand doesn't actually show the interviewer what you can do.”

How might you mess it up ?

In answering these three main types of questions, there are a few common ways that interviewees consistently go awry. Many candidates, for instance, will tout a certain expertise and then struggle to demonstrate their skills in this area.

“I like to ask a candidate what technology they feel is their strongest competency and then drill very hard into that,” says Caldwell. “I will ask for specific examples in which they faced a challenging problem they needed to solve in that technology, how they did it, and why it was challenging or interesting. Too often, I get really bland answers that show the candidate is either relatively novice in the technology or has no ability to communicate the impact of the work they did.”

Another default reaction of many interviewees when they panic is to quickly admit they don’t know. No matter how flustered you are, do not give up so easily. Rather, talk through your thought process to at least show the interviewer how you approach roadblocks.

Something similar happens when interviewers begin with simpler questions to ease into the interview and end up learning a lot (in a bad way) when an anxious interviewee responds in a hostile or condescending manner. And because interviewers will be comparing a candidate’s performance and behavior directly to that of other candidates, it’s worth doing well on the simple stuff. “I had one candidate who was completely blown away to discover that a number to the zero power was one,” says McDowell. “He was convinced there was something wrong with my math.”

How to get it right ?

So just how should the wannabe tech employee handle unexpected, difficult questions in the heat of an interview? Five pieces of advice from the experts:

• 1. Sit and think. Write down all relevant information.
• 2. Ask a lot of questions. Sometimes interview questions aren't as confusing or overwhelming once you start to clarify some assumptions that either you or the interviewer might have made.
• 3. Find a logical framework for solving the problem, and an approach that will allow you to start making progress.
• 4. Simplify the problem by removing constraints. Finding a way of breaking down the problem is almost more important than finding the right way or the best way. Show the interviewer that you don’t get overwhelmed, you don’t get scared off.
• 5. Be ready to test your code. Pay particular attention to brushing up on code qualifications you list in your resume.
• 6. Don’t forget to prepare for the basic or non-technical questions that examine both your outside interests and your behavioral intelligence.

Remember, McDowell adds, “Communication and approaching with a logical framework will get you a really long way with the interviewer. How you think you’re doing has no bearing on how you’re actually doing. Nobody is so smart that they won’t find a single question hard.”