Interview Questions

A couple of days ago I was blogging about hiring. Today I want to continually expand this subject but focus on interview questions. So this could help you in 2 ways. First, as you will need to interview people, it can help to build you interview script or even that preparation is hard and every company is different and has different cultural FIT I would say there some questions which are common or even make sense to be ready to answer. So I have a video to go throught the Interview Questions towards soft-skills / people questions. So Let's go!


Video

Video Script

Solutions: Architecture and Design

• Explain Previous project Architecture - what improve and why?

• Given a problem and ask people how to fix it (i.g Twitter)

People Questions

• What were the last three books you read? Papers?

  • Books: 

    • Outcomes over Outputs

    • Project Myopia

    • NO Estimates

  • Papers:

    • Google Autoscaling

    • Choosing a cloud DBMS - Redshift

    • Serverless, One step Forward and 2 Backward

• Three strengths you have

  • Hardworking 

    • Working beyond 8h

    • Care about things beyond my scope - other projects

    • Share Links with everybody (useful for other problems)

  • Communication

    • Convey ideas and sell projects/endeavors i.g Slide Decks

    • Write summary emails (issues, incidents, lessons learned)

    • Ping people in Private to see if they are okay.

  • Result Oriented

    • Proactively think about corner cases.

    • Proactively do code review - outside of PR flow.

    • Make sure we have a balance between features x tech and value. Work on waves.  

• Three attitudes you are working to improve - focus on behavior

  • Fewer Details

    • I've often give Too many details in emails and chats.

    • Even speaking, I would give long answers easily. 

  • Less Energy

    • I've got a passion for what I do - So I need to slow down sometimes. Speak too much. 

  • Improve Cost awareness

    • Prioritize interviews over tech/engineering activities

• 1 Situation where did you fail

How to Evaluate Agile / Lean Skills?

1.  What does Agile / Lean mean to you?

   1. Effective Learning

   2. Principles

   3. See and Avoid Waste

   4. It's about the whole system

   5. It's about the customer/user

   6. How do you things matter - tech excellence

2.  How do you perform facilitations? 

   1. Day-by-day work, meetings, retros, working with software (tech facilitation). 

3.  What're the principles behind some ceremonies like DEMO and Retro? 

   1. DEMO - Show / Understand

   2. RETRO - Reflect and Improve

4. What are the main differences between Kanban and Scrum? 

   1. Dates

   2. Level of Details

   3. Timeboxes 

   4. Approach to change version easy to adopt

5. How to handle a painful or lousy product owner?

   1. Education

   2. Patience and Experiments

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco