
Ask HN: Learning to conduct an interview? - literatim
Hi HN,<p>I am a new grad and I just recently joined a pretty big tech company. They are in the process of changing their interview process and I want to be a part of it. My interview was pretty typical; I had an interview on my campus, which was 1-2 coding questions, and a fly out to the company with 5 1-hr interviews, 4 of which were coding questions, and one was behavioral. All the coding questions were very typical Cracking the Coding Interview style questions. There were some general knowledge questions like algorithms and data structures<p>My questions to HN are:<p>1. What is an example of a company or an interview process that you think is good? If you think the setup I described above is good, why do you think that?<p>2. How do you select what interview questions to ask?<p>3. What are some good resources for preparing myself for something like this?<p>Any help is appreciated :) !
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General suggestions :

\- Make sure that the candidate has a really positive experience after the
interview. That would mean being very courteous and not interrupting him when
he/she is talking, etc.

\- When I interview candidates, I generally read up his resume and circle
interesting topics/projects he has worked on. By engaging in a technical
conversation with him/her you can gauge his ability. I despise interviewing
processes which google/Amazon follow where they just throw a bunch of
programming questions irrespective of what his skill set / role he is
interviewing for.

Being junior, you might not be exposed to all those technologies/terminologies
in the resume, but that's where your learning comes in! If you are
interviewing a senior candidate, see if he/she can actually explain a complex
idea and distill it so that you are able to grasp it. Senior folks in the team
are expected to lead/mentor junior engineers and his/her ability in this
regard can easily be judged. Also, you can ask him/her to explain trade
offs/design choices, etc.

\- With respect to programming question/design question, let the interview
take its own natural course. Have a couple of back up questions just in case.
My favorites are design LRU cache or something to that effect / atoi or
something similar. The problem in itself is simple, but there are a lot of
layers to it. You can see the candidate thinking through the problem
loudly/arriving at a solution and improving on it. Please don't ask questions
which are hit/miss - Eight Queens problem, etc. They are hardly useful!

To summarize, \- Make it a positive experience for the candidate. \- Go for
his resume - engage in a tech conversation. Ask for a design diagram, explain
trade offs, etc. \- Keep a couple of design/programming back up questions just
in case.

And have fun!

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JSeymourATL
Suggest reading Laslo Bock's book- Work Rules!

One rule stands-out, hire only people who are better than you. And
importantly, “hire by committee.”

> [http://www.amazon.com/Work-Rules-Insights-Inside-
> Transform/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Work-Rules-Insights-Inside-
> Transform/dp/1455554790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456850969&sr=8-1&keywords=bock%2C+work+rules)

