I got an interview with botnet tech giant coming up.
Can we have a tech interview story thread?
Also, tough questions you've been asked in interviews?
>>47618598
Had a phone interview with a big company in Seattle a while back, that you may be familiar with.
They just asked about previous projects, describe technical details, biggest challenges. They gave me a scenario and told me to throw out some suggestions for implementation. Nothing you can really prepare for.
The job turned out to be a test position not development though, so wasn't really interesting to me.
>>47618598
I had an interview for a job freshman year of college with a research group on campus. Prepared for technical questions and all they did was ask me about a project I had on my resume. Then they hired me on the spot. Been working there ever since.
>>47618639
yeah this is an engineering role interview. and botnets tend to ask very technical questions.
>>47618717
My friend who interviewed for botnet got reverse a string in place algorithm, explain big O notation, performance of a few data structures, how do I traverse a graph with O(logn) performance and a few typical SV-style questions "How many golf balls fit in a school bus", "Why is a manhole round"
Read your textbook again and answer all the questions. I hope to never have to do one of those shitty interviews
>>47618598
I've done all types of interviews with small and big tech companies and I haven't even graduated. I'm also not a CE, CS major or an EE for that matter.
The toughest questions for me were the behavioural hypotheticals. Because there's no right or wrong answer, but the interviewer wants to hear the answer they want, not what seems logical and reasonable most of the times. There's also a ton of variables to consider. For example, "You've almost finished a project and then another person gives you a more important project, what do you do?"
There are multiple answers, none of them exactly right and none of them wrong really, as long as your answer isn't "lol ignore boss two's new project."
You should also look back at your experiences (work, projects, labs) and reminisce challenges, problems, failures and successes, and come up with proper, detailed answers to questions such as "what's your biggest failure." A huge mistake is dressing up a failure as a success, or a weakness as a success. These types of questions is mainly HR bullshit but also important for them to judge your character. Its not about the situation, its about how you responded to the challenge/task etc.
Technical questions...it depends. For internships/entry level jobs, they're mainly looking for your problem solving skill and not how much you know a textbook. The higher up you go though, the more important it is to know the textbook. They'll generally hit you with a hard question to gauge how you react, and then tone it down to see your actual knowledge. Go to Glassdoor and check out your company and read the anecdotes.
Finally, DON'T BE FUCKING NERVOUS. I blew so many interviews with awesome companies because I was nervous. I figured out why I was nervous (stressing about it all night and day) and I only got an offer from a smaller company when I avoided being nervous.
>>47618778
great advice bro, i'll look into it.
not being nervous will be tough. maybe i'll take some benzos?
>>47618915
If you're going to do that, know what your tolerance is beforehand and do a few test runs. Also be careful of them freeing your tongue overly, talking too much is probably not good and they will notice
>>47618952
well how did you deal with it?
>>47618963
I didn't, I was nervous as fuck, but got my composure after about 5-10 minutes in. Once you start talking you should be fine. If you're answering technical questions, make sure you've studied the material enough so you can remember under stress. If it's an in person interview, practice solving problems on a whiteboard, they love that shit even if it's irrelevant to everyday work, and it's not easy
>>47618778
Out of curiosity, what major are you? Were you applying to software positions?
OP:
>Finally, DON'T BE FUCKING NERVOUS.
This is so true. Being a confident likable guy will go a very very long way. That said, most interviewers understand that people won't necessarily be at their best in an interview and it of course won't save you if you can't code.
>>47618763
What's wrong with the golf ball and manhole questions? I don't think the point is to get a perfect answer, just one that you can justify.
>>47619538
No issue with either of those, it's mostly all the "Can you remember you CS101 textbook?" type gotcha questions they love in those interviews. It's not reflective of what you actually do in a software development job. Having to type out a BFS traversal algorithm from memory is fucking dumb and would actually be terrible practice if you did that in everyday coding, instead of using a library or built-in method
>>47619538
I've heard that they don't ask those riddle type questions anymore. They apparently don't indicate good programmers.
>>47619742
They just indicate autism.
>>47619207
ME. I'm a giant fucking nerd though so I applied to a bunch of scripting/programming/excel and matlab bitch jobs and got interviews somehow.
The job I'll be doing after this semester for a year or so is half mechanical half software/IT which is fun I guess.
You are right about one thing. Interviewers will see that you're nervous and cut you some slack if you're young.
I work for a botnet company, based in Seattle, but I'm in sydney. 7 one hour interviews. I got the job ofc, coz I'm badass.
probably the worst feeling is when you're there with like 5 other folks all interviewing for the same job. happened to me recently, we were there for around 4 hours though the company at least catered us lunch. they at least had the decency to not have group interviews.
one thing was that i was the oldest there (i wasted my time on my first degree, went for a different one since i actually liked the new curriculum). i think they expected a lot more projects and stuff but i had so little to talk about. first part focused on group projects, challenges, and how you handled problems and second part focused on more technical stuff, problem solving ideas, and how you'd handle leading a big project. i totally bonked the lead thing, forgetting my whole last semester which was completely based on just that... didn't get job. still unemployed, regularly shave beard
>why is your employment history so empty anon?
>>47619619
Does it get any harder than this? I could do BFS or MergeSort/Quicksort and stuff like this, maybe a Fibonacci Heap or an AVL tree with enough time.
But there is much more difficult shit like k-d trees or amortized analysis and I definitively couldn't do that without muh textbook
>>47621230
I got into a group interview at a start up branch of a much bigger company. I wasn't really what they were looking for (they wanted into web dev which I wasn't and still am not). On top of that two of the interviewers were remote and talking to us over a group call. The other three were just there with one guy leading, and it was pretty obvious they lost interest in me right from the start becasue they were only asking the other guys questions so I got really nervous and just wanted to leave. They said they'd contact me within a week about their decision but then I never heard back at all (not that I expected to).
>>47621279
I had this happen once too, spent an hour just explaining why I don't have much work history and why I decided to transfer after my junior year of college and why I'm switching majors.
