Olivier Langlois, IT superstar coach
Hi handsome action taker!
I have the belief that you should not go crazy
with preparation as you have been preparing all your life with the time that you spent doing your craft and this is how you got the interview in the first place. The few days you have before the interview won't be enough to transform you into an expert if you aren't already one. Probably a best approach is to change your mind and penetrate the interview in an excellent and relaxed state of mind and focus on ways to make you liked by the interviewer as I have already written in a previous article.
However, based on my experience on being interviewed by Facebook and Google, I have noticed an obvious pattern that you can certainly leverage to help you to determine what to focus on during your interview preparation. I
have this single question that if you can ask yourself and take action on it because we both are action takers that make both of us better tech pros than the average professional.
What are the algorithms that are most likely used in the regular day to day tasks in that company?
I have been through the Google interview process 3 times and every time they had questions about sorting and searching algorithms. Was it surprising? It should not be as indexing and ranking web pages certainly involve a great deal of sorting and searching.
If you have an interview with Facebook, make sure that you review the graph algorithms chapter before the interview and so on.
Flip the table and ask
questions:
Some questions that you ask might be to qualify the company to see if it would be able to meet your expectations. I have found that this type of questions typically work best when you are talking with the hiring manager. Phone screening interviews only purpose is to determine if your skills are sufficiently good to justify continue moving forward. If you can come up with good questions about their own systems,
you might impress them.
For instance, with Wireshark, I have found out that most Web servers negotiate a TCP MSS of 1460 bytes which is the standard MSS in a 1500 bytes Ethernet frame. For some reason, Google servers return 1430 bytes. Knowing that they are obsessed with network optimisations that is highly improbably that they would waste 30 bytes in every packet. Ask them why they are doing
that?
I still have to find a Google software engineer knowing the answer. The funniest answer that I got, is that I should ask why to Edward Snowden (which I did. That seemed like an awesome marketing stunt!)
You can try to convey that you are fun by infusing some humor:
Right after I ask for how long they have been working at Google or Facebook and they reply X years, then I'll ask if that means that they are now a millionaire. It usually gets a few laughs.
We the best!
Now go dominate your interview and write me back about your successes like all the other big action takes of this team are doing to my inbox!
