The technical or whiteboard interview is a common step in all software developer interviews. Just keep in mind that this meeting can happen sooner or later in the interview process.
What is the purpose of this meeting?
There is no doubt this meeting is a bit more stressful than others. A lot of people believe that a developer needs to have the ability to discuss a problem and a possible solution at a higher level. That is where whiteboard or even a pice of paper comes in, by only drawing and mapping your thoughts using figures, diagrams and shapes. You might not necessarily need to go into little details of implementation, but rather discuss the steps you would take to solve a particular problem. It is common to ask two types of questions in this interview:
Tip: I completely understand that software interviews can be a bit scary, so my hope is to give you clear ideas about the interview process and offer you practical advice on how to do well at each step.
This course can be very helpful for you to get an overview of all the common interview steps that companies go through to hire a developer. Join me in this journey here.
Design or Architectural Based Questions
No matter how skilled you are, it is always a good sign if developers have the ability to imagine a bigger picture design of the system they are working on.
In dev teams, it is usually the job of more senior developers to help design the architecture of the application and general processes and pipelines. However, it is expected for everyone on the team to have an impact on those decisions. The more you educate yourself in the years towards becoming a senior developer, the clearer your answer will be to these types of questions.
So in a nutshell, they want to see you try to think about them. You can get your knowledge for these types of questions from all your previous projects (even small), or by reading best practices and architectural based articles from more experienced developers. Example questions for this type can be:
- How would you display a list of items by relying on an external source like API?
- How would you describe a database design for two tables that should reference each other?
- If you wanted to build an e-commerce site, how would you go about designing its architecture?
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