Engineering interviews can be challenging because we often feel like we know how to code, we have samples of our work and these samples should be good enough to get us hired. From a hiring manager’s perspective though, development is usually a team effort and no matter how great a coder might be, if he doesn’t fit in with the group, it can make for a less-than-awesome work environment. Also, skill sets vary from company to company and it’s important to remember that a hiring manager needs to find a person with the right experience and temperament for the position.

It’s as important for the interviewee to land in a great spot as it is for an interviewer to find a good engineer so the interview process should work well for both parties. So like it or not, interviewing is just part of the process of landing a great contract.

Here are some tips for getting prepared to ace your technical interview.

Know Who You’ll Be Meeting

If you’re interviewing at a start-up, you’ll most likely be meeting with a senior developer, possibly the CTO) and definitely members of the dev team. You’ll probably “cut to the chase” and focus on technology because the interviewers will likely all be engineers.

Larger companies often have additional interviews with HR or recruiters and possibly non-technical managers. These interviews look for soft skills: how you collaborate, communication skills, and how it might be to work with you on a team.

Know your audience! Tech-speak is great for the engineering interview but probably less great with a non-technical interviewer. Facet will give you background on each of the people you’re meeting with so you can appropriately prepare.

As for the technical portions of the interviews, you will be asked challenging technical questions that are often not related to anything you do, day-to-day.

The Interview Process

In general, there are three distinct parts to an engineering interview, and they are usually in this order, and are broken out in detail below.

• Coding: This is usually first, because if you can’t code, it’s not worth moving forward.
• Behavioral or working style: While actual programming is a solitary work, building software is usually a team endeavor. Companies want to ensure you play well with others.
• Design/architecture: Once the basics are done, then comes the test to see how you envision the bigger picture.

Coding

It’s not enough to talk about your qualifications and why you’re right for the job, you must prove it. And that means a coding challenge.

Challenges may be online (hosted by sites like CoderByte) or on a whiteboard; and the exercise is usually done with your interviewer in the room.

Here’s what the interviewer is looking for during the coding portion of the interview:

• Can you actually code? (This seems silly, but you’d be surprised!)