How To Excell in Interviews after Your Software Engineering Bootcamp

Love them or hate them, Interviews are a necessary part of any career. In our experience, interviews at tech firms follow a similar process. Usually, companies have a three to five-stage process that will look something like this:

Initial screening call

Normally, this will be with a recruitment professional either working at the company's HR department or as an outside recruitment firm.

Behavioral or Culture Fit

This interview is there to make sure you will be a good fit for the team, and do you have the personality traits and drive that the company is looking for.

Whiteboarding

When in person this interview is normally done on an actual whiteboard with drywipe pens, you will write pseudocode to articulate how you would approach a problem. That said, purely whiteboarding interviews do appear to be less common, often the questions asked here are done as part of a technical or architecture interview.

Technical Interview(s)

This could be a take-home task, or you could be asked to share your screen and work on a problem live in front of your interviewer. Generally, this interview is conducted by a lead or senior developer or two.

The Screening Call

If you've been able to snag a screening call, well done you have got your foot in the door to the rest of the process.

Generally speaking, this is a bit of a tick-box exercise for both you and the recruitment professional. As a junior software engineer, it's important to know that recruiters are often working from a list of requirements to make sure you have the required skills for the job. It's inevitable that you will be asked whether you have experience in things that you don't. You must never lie but try swinging a negative question into a positive answer. For example:

Question: How much experience do you have with Vue.js?

Bad answer: Sorry I've never used Vue.js 😕.

Good answer: Vue is something I've been interested in working with, but I've not had the opportunity to work with it yet. I've built projects in React.js during my software engineering boot camp which also uses a virtual DOM so I'm sure the learning curve would be quite shallow. Will I need to use Vue.js as part of the interview process or can I demonstrate my knowledge with React.js?

Although not always the case, recruiters will sometimes have limited knowledge of the team structure, tech stack, and day-to-day job requirements but you can absolutely ask questions about the interview process or the company as a whole.

We find that talking about pay can be an awkward subject for some people, however, if you do have questions about pay and progression this would be a good time to ask them. The HR or recruitment professional should have already talked about this with the hiring manager and is usually in the best position to answer these questions.

Behavioral Interview Preparation and Responses

Depending on who is taking this interview this can be more or less technical, however, questions in the behavioral interview are usually centered around you as a person rather than your skills. The questions you get asked may be scenario-based or based on your previous experience. You may encounter questions such as:

• "Tell us about a time that you missed a deadline, how did you deal with this?"

• "How would you approach reviewing a colleague's pull request?"

• "You are given a task to complete in an area of the codebase you've never seen before, what steps would you follow to complete the task?"

• And the dreaded "Where do you see yourself in 5 - 10 years?"

You can and should take a moment to think about how to respond during the interview without rushing directly into an answer.

Remember to be yourself here, Whilst it can be tempting to just tell the interviewer what you think they want to hear you should make sure that you give honest answers.

Mastering Technical Interview Questions

This is the interview that often sparks anxiety amongst boot camp graduates. It's nothing to worry about though it's just important to know that you're there to demonstrate that you know how to code and break down a problem effectively.

We could give you a bunch of different examples of coding questions here but honestly, the best way to get good at these questions is to practice using platforms such as Leetcode and Codewars.

It's important to make sure you break down the problem, you should ask your interviewer questions about the problem before writing a single line of code.

During our Full Stack Engineering Bootcamp, we challenge students to build a bunch of technical solutions to different problems similar to those that you might get asked in an interview so that you are fully prepared.

Mock Interview Practice and Feedback

When I was 10 years old I was at karate practice Sensei told me "Practice does not make perfect" me and the other children looked at each other thinking Sensei had gone mad. "Perfect practice makes perfect!" His point is that if you consistently practice badly then you will end up doing badly. Unfortunately, this is true with interviewing. The number one most important thing for improvement is getting feedback.

During module 5 of our Full Stack Software Engineering Bootcamp, we conduct mock interviews to make sure you get actionable feedback ready for the real thing.

We recommend taking any and all interviews that you are offered, even if you do not intend to take the job as it gives you the opportunity to practice your interview skills in a low-risk environment. Whilst you won't always get it, you should ALWAYS ask for feedback from your interviewers.

I hope that this gives you a bit of an insight into what interviewing for tech roles entails.