Makers: 4 useful things I learnt during mock tech interviews.
While doing mock tech interviews, I picked up a few insights that would be useful for aspiring software developers
Why Tech? And why now?
This is the first question I ask when I am conducting mock interviews. Okay, it is two questions, but it is a devilishly simple way of asking the interviewee to give me their journey.
Humans are natural storytellers, we define ourselves by the sum of our experiences, be they shared or personal. We can use these stories to paint a portrait of ourselves.
If I were to ask you to paint said portrait and gave you the option of high-end top-of-the-line state-of-the-art paints from the most exotic pigments known to mankind or a set of 6 crayons that I found in a bin, which would you choose?
Whether we like it or not many of us have developed a habit of choosing the crayons — possibly because we won’t have to try too hard to work out the brush strokes and we find the smell of trash comforting.
This leads me to my first observation during my time as an interviewer which helped me understand being an interviewee.
Our journey is more interesting than we think.
If you had had a mock interview with me, it is because you had (HAD!) either just passed, or were about to pass the Makers Academy Bootcamp, widely considered one of the best in Europe. You bloody did it!
This was a point of pride in a lot of my interviewee’s stories; rightly so, it is a tough course both mentally and emotionally. But with some I found that beyond talking about Makers, there was a disconnect with their lives leading up to it.
I had people explain to me after the interview that they had dropped out or failed Uni for various reasons. I had people tell me that they had worked seemingly menial jobs for years beforehand and that is why they chose not to divulge too much about their past etc.
To this I ask: and?
“I originally trained as an actor, and I am happy to report that the theatres of London are not missing out too much on my career change.”
“I dropped out of a Uni degree that was taking me nowhere, spent years wandering Europe without much of a future in sight and failed to get a company I had worked on for 4 years off the ground at its pivotal moment.”
He draws, the stench of bin-crayon now engulfing him.
If I were to look at the same set of circumstances under the light of “Why tech? and why now?”, the paints start to look a little more appealing:
“Well, I trained as an actor. I started heading down that route then one day me and a friend came up with the idea of making an iOS app for actors to help them rehearse their lines, we learnt a huge amount about tech and how to run a business but after years of trying we decided to take a break.”
“He became a software developer and I went to travel Europe. As I had already experienced tech I decided to give development a go and started doing online courses, talking to various friends I realised that I had to get onto the Makers course and now here I am!”
You are the architect of your own story and I promise you that if you take a step back and look at your journey objectively, there are points of interest that you are not used to seeing.
If you are embarrassed by aspects of your past, don’t worry — we all are!
But you are here now, whether through Makers or whatever route you chose, find a way to see how your experiences led to this point. You might end up surprising yourself.
We know more than we think.
Plato once wrote: “I know that I know nothing”.
Thus I conclude that I know more than Plato and so do you!
Subjectively the scariest part of any tech interview is, well, the tech part.
Coding and development is such a vast sea of concepts, languages, frameworks, methods, buzz words etc. It can be a daunting task to appear confident in explaining your understanding.
During the interviews I conducted, I found that some of the interviewees would get increasingly nervous at having to explain the tech stack of their projects.
I had one poor soul who positively panicked at the idea of diagraming their latest group project. However every single one of them (with the right direction and questions) could explain their work in a concise and easy to understand way.
You won’t know everything, and you are not supposed to; for a Junior role you should be curious and malleable like an inquisitive putty. Ask yourself to diagram how your project works across the stack and use google to fill in any blanks in your understanding.
By the end you’ll have a lovely picture and a pretty clear view of how each part of the project works. Look up the definition to buzz words such as OOD, TDD, agile development, SOLID principles, DRY etc.
I guarantee you will know more than you think about each of them but these are valuable concepts to grasp and will make you sound really bloody smart in an interview.
All roles are team-based
This was a bit of a revelation for me during my own interviews that I tried to pass on when I was the interviewer. Of course interviewers want you to be competent developers, but the single most important thing (from my understanding) that any junior developer can be is a good team player.
You will be there to code, yes, but you will also be there to check other people’s code, to be reviewed and take feedback, to brainstorm. So being empathetic and understanding the importance of team cohesion is vital to a successful software company.
When the interviewer starts to talk about challenges and how you overcame them, maybe consider how a team benefited from your actions and how you added value to other people’s work and lives.
If not asked about it, it might be a good idea to bring up your understanding of pair-programming as it is usually an integral part of a tech company’s system. Your ability to communicate, both the good and the bad in a tough situation, will be the factor that makes you stand out.
Give yourself time.
You are excited about tech, you are passionate about tech, this just might be your dream job…but they won’t understand this if you forget to breathe.
Something I learnt from my acting days is that when we are reading a script, we are always going faster than we think we are. I believe the same can be true in an interview situation.
There is a lot on the line when you enter the room: it could be a life-changing moment. Of course you want to get everything across and show them that you are exactly what they’ve been looking for — but without time to think this may not be clear.
So slow it down, breathe and let yourself think. I promise it won’t come across like you’ve been stumped.
Additionally, don’t be afraid to ask for clarity if you are unsure of what is being asked. I kept my questions pretty vague so that it could be questioned if there was any confusion — it created a much better atmosphere for both me and the interviewee.
In conclusion: you are already awesome.
Whatever your career/life was before you transitioned to tech, you have made a life-changing and difficult (yes actually really really difficult) decision to pivot your fortunes to the future.
It was once explained to me that tech is a big room with a small door. You just need to get past the threshold and everything will be different. You’ve been given an interview: this is that chance!
My final words will be to not take anything personally. You will get there and if it doesn’t work out this time it really wasn’t the role for you. And it is never a reflection on you or your ability, they just weren’t looking for what you have to offer, someone else is.
Did I say you’re awesome yet? Just keep remembering that.