CommunityNews

CommunityNews

The best engineering interview question I’ve ever gotten, Part 1

The best engineering interview question I’ve ever gotten, Part 1
.
It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering
interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013.
(They haven’t even kept their name,
so I assume they’re not still relying on this specific interview question.
I don’t feel bad for revealing it. It’s a great story that I tell people a lot;
I’ve just never blogged it before.)

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Most Liked

OvermindDL1

OvermindDL1

That’s similar to the “thought process” questions I use to try to figure out how someone thinks in interviews as well, they are super useful.

finner

finner

A few years ago I started asking just one question:

Can you describe the architecture of a recent project you worked on?

Usually we’d then start a discussion about deployment pipelines, tech stacks, methodologies and the like used. I haven’t done many interviews and I hate trying to corner people into sneaky tech corners. It makes me uncomfortable :rofl: . I just want to know if the person understands the big picture when they are working on isolated pieces and it gives me a good sense of their communication/ “presentation” skills.

OvermindDL1

OvermindDL1

Very much agree on all that!

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: iPaul
TOKYO (Kyodo) – Japan’s government plans to encourage firms to let their employees choose to work four days a week instead of five, aimin...
New
First poster: AstonJ
:tada: Launching Fig I am excited to announce that, as of today, Fig is generally available to the public for download. With our public ...
New
OvermindDL1
Yet another rust-made text editor, though I’m really liking the looks of how this one works!
New
First poster: bot
Large Language Models like ChatGPT say The Darnedest Things. The Errors They MakeWhy We Need to Document Them, and What We Have Decided ...
New
First poster: Korbin73
Whatever happened to Elm, anyway?. I see this question pop up quite frequently in lots of different arenas - folks are curious as to wha...
New
First poster: bot
[js/web] WebGPU backend via JSEP by fs-eire · Pull Request #14579 · microsoft/onnxruntime. Description This change introduced the follo...
New
First poster: joeb
The new frameworks will continue until morale improves.
/js
New
New
New
First poster: braycarla
In beginning the NVIDIA Blackwell Linux testing with the GeForce RTX 5090 compute performance, besides all the CUDA/OpenCL/OptiX benchmar...
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Hello Devtalk World! Please let us know a little about who you are and where you’re from :nerd_face:
New
Exadra37
Please tell us what is your preferred monitor setup for programming(not gaming) and why you have chosen it. Does your monitor have eye p...
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework. Brian Okken @brianokken Edited by Kat...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build efficient applications that exploit the unique benefits of a pure functional language, learning from an engineer who uses Haskell t...
New
DevotionGeo
I have always used antique keyboards like Cherry MX 1800 or Cherry MX 8100 and almost always have modified the switches in some way, like...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Lint your docs like code: turn any style guide into enforceable rules with Vale and publish clear, consistent content every time. ...
New