
Ask HN: What are interviews like in non-software engineering professions? - sage76
Currently going through the hackerrank&#x2F;algo DS process.<p>What is it like for other fields, especially other engineering fields?
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delazeur
I am a chemical engineer currently working in a consulting niche (air
emissions control and regional air quality management). My interviews have
very consistently been designed to test my writing and public speaking skills,
which are admittedly crucial in my job, rather than specific engineering
knowledge. At this point, my resume contains reasonably strong evidence that I
possess such knowledge, but that wasn't the case when I was starting out and
the interviews weren't really any different. The closest things to technical
questions I can remember being asked are of the form: "Imagine a piece of
equipment you are responsible for isn't working. What are some steps you would
take to identify and solve the problem?"

I have also occasionally interviewed for non-SWE positions at tech companies
(usually data scientist or regulatory compliance positions, both of which are
closely related to my current field), and I have found the interviews to be
similarly light on technical material, but with much less emphasis on speaking
and writing skills.

Not having been through any SWE interviews myself, that's about as much as I
can say in comparison. My loose impression is that SWE interviews are
relatively heavy on logic puzzles and mini coding problems, but that's all I
know. I am happy to answer more specific questions about my experience, of
course.

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rurban
Less stupid technical questions, because there are much less cheaters and you
can trust the given educational background.

I worked as architect, mech. engineer and various other engineering sectors.
There are some technical questions of course but nothing like whiteboarding
binary search or tree traversal.

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avmich
A young rocketry startup once offered to an applicant a challenge to show
skills with hardware. This kit - [https://www.sainsmart.com/sainsmart-
balancing-robot-kit-v2.h...](https://www.sainsmart.com/sainsmart-balancing-
robot-kit-v2.html) \- was required to assemble and in general to make working
in a week and bring back the results. The kit was given by the company.

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bsvalley
Reading at the comments, it tells me how easy, fast and cheap it would be for
a machine to crack a software job interview with TODAY's technology. It tells
me software dev jobs are the first inline when AI will take over.

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romanhn
Nah, the standard software engineering interviews don't represent the day-to-
day reality of a software engineer. That's why they're so frustrating and
impractical. So maybe you can build some deep learning bot that can pass an
interview, but it won't know how to gather requirements or deal with vague and
contradictory requests. We're far away from AI figuring out that what people
want and what they need are often very different things.

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angrydev
I've often wondered if non-SWP interviews involve homework... I hate this
aspect of interviewing for positions.

