Interview questions I've taken from the internet

• Personality:
  • “ Tell me about the last time you had strong opinions about something and later changed your mind”
  • “What was the last thing you taught yourself how to do? How did you learn it?”
  • “Tell me about the most difficult feedback you’ve ever received? What was it and how have you changed based on the feedback?”
  • “Tell me about a time you faced a crisis? What happened? What was the outcome? What did you learn about yourself?”
• Programming
  • “What’s the code you wrote a long time ago that it still bugs you that you never got a chance to refactor?”
  • “What does good code look like to you?”
    • Variation: “We’ve hired you, but two weeks from now, you’ve discovered there’s some things we do here that you don’t like. What would that be?”
  • In your view, what is the hardest problem in software engineering?
    • Good answers:
      • Caching
    • Best answer:
      • Requirements gathering
  • “Tell me about a time you identified a problem and solved it.”
    • I’m not interested in measuring a person’s ability to problem solve tasks given to them, but rather, their ability to identify a new problem, triage it, and then solve it.
  • Python
    • When should you pick threading, multiprocessing, or asyncio?
    • What are your favorite libraries?
      • My brownie points:
        • Pydantic
        • Polars
    • What don’t you like about Python?
      • Lots of good answers here. They should have a lot to say. The only wrong answer is not having anything to say.
  • How do you keep up with what’s going on in the industry?
    • Software differentiates itself from other industries in that
• Ask them about an interesting OSS codebase they worked on / an article they read / whatever and ask them to share it with you after the interview (“that sounds super interesting, can you send me an email after the interview?”) and they actually follow up.
  • I really like this question. The most important trait in any environment is responsiveness, in that people actually do the shit they say they’re going to do.
  • The article/whatever isn’t important at all, brownie points I guess, but it’s not what’s being measured.