Technical interviews

Perspectives

• Passion speaks volumes!
• Tell me about your current side-project.
• Skill of the interviewer - have empathy - this is a partnership
• Whiteboarding. Try to use your PC.
  • Use Yeoman generators for quickly creating a test harness.
• Scope the problem!!!!! (by asking questions)

Technical tests

• Types
  • Timed and untimed
  • Onsite and at home
• Guidance
  • Be very diligent about your naming!
  • Lint the shit out of it!
  • Be consistent
  • Get the MVP working first ... soon
  • Add unit tests (you'll get huge props)
  • Do it again another way (different success metric)

General technical questions about JavaScript

• Variable scoping
• object context (this)
• call(), apply() and bind()
• Prototypal inheritance (the prototype chain)
• HackReactor course on Udacity
• Be able to create a simple fullstack app. Looking up references should be intentional, minimal and targetted. This will require practicing it.

What sets us apart technically?

• Your ability to write unit/integration tests
  • It would be good if you could describe the difference (different kinds of tests)
  • Answer: what is the difference between TDD and unit testing?
• Pair programming exprience: advantages/disadvantages/caveats/noticings
• Working on teams: partitioning work, roles, agile practices (retros, sprint planning, etc.)
• Full stack: writing client AND server code
• Debugging: DevTools (breakpoints, step into, step over, callstack, etc.)
• Actual projects.

How does Don check tech tests?

• How loops are done
• Prefer minimal nesting (use functions when need nesting)
• Diligent naming (variables, functions, modules, etc)?'
• Unit tests

What is Don looking for in a tech interview?

• Passion for the technology, the team and the industry.
• How likely is this person to write code when they aren't getting paid for it?
• How tenatious are they when they run into a difficult challenge? How are they emotionally? Excited? Defeated?

What should I take with me to the interview?

• Pad of paper and pen
• Questions (in the pad)
• At least 3 paper copies of your CV
• Laptop (prepared to show projects and code)

What questions should I ask the interviewer?

• Do you do unit or integration testing?
• How are your teams structured?
• Do you do pair programming? When? How?
• How do you perform requirements analysis?
• How do you engage the end user/customer?
• Do you use agile practices? Which ones? How?
• Do you contribute to open source initiatives?
• How has your technology choices evolved over time?
• How does ________ give back to the community? Society?
• Do you match charitable donations? Do you support charitable orgs?
• What processes do you use to encourage continous improvement?
• What practices do you have in place to grow people?

Preparation: What do to next (with our time)?

• Pick 6 repos on GitHub and pin them
• Make sure the READMEs are up to date and cover setup (clone, install, knex ...)
• Add backlog items to the repo (GitHub Issues) and prioritise them
• Write code daily! Push commits daily!