Questions for Engineering Interviewers

"That concludes our questions. Do you have any questions for us?" My mind went blank. Six technical questions were nailed, but I hadn't prepared for this part. I asked something forgettable about their tech stack, saw the slight disappointment in the engineering manager's eyes, and got rejected the next day. That failure changed my approach to every engineering interview since. The Better Way to Handle Technical Interviews In my next interview, instead of asking basic questions, I shared what I understood about their technical challenges first. "Based on our discussion and my research, it seems you're dealing with performance issues as your user base grows. I've worked with similar bottlenecks. Are you considering optimizing your current architecture or a microservices approach?" The engineering manager leaned forward. Our scheduled 45-minute interview stretched to over an hour as we discussed real problems. I got the job with a better offer than expected. How to Prepare This for Engineering Roles 🎢 Research their technical challenges - GitHub repositories if open source - Engineering blog posts - System architecture hints from the job description 🎢 Prepare focused technical questions - "I noticed you're using [technology]. Are you facing [common challenge] or more concerned with [alternative challenge]?" - "The role mentions [technical requirement]. Is that because you're trying to solve [specific problem]?" Why This Works in Technical Interviews 📍 Shows you understand real engineering challenges 📍 Demonstrates technical thinking beyond coding questions 📍 Positions you as a problem-solver rather than just a skilled coder 📍 Gives them a preview of how you approach technical discussions An engineering director later told me: "When you discussed our actual performance issues rather than asking about work hours, you immediately stood out from other candidates who had similar technical skills." Keep it authentic, brief, and focused on their most pressing technical problems. What technical questions have worked well in your engineering interviews? 🚀

The last 5 min of your interviews are usually reserved for questions. Don’t underestimate this portion of the interview. Here is what I’ve learned about the fine art of preparing questions for technical/behavioral interviews: Missed part 1 of this series? Read here ➡️ https://lnkd.in/enHUeexr Each question you ask should have a purpose. Those purposes can be organized into 3 main buckets. Your questions can: 1️⃣ show you know your sh*t about the company & industry 2️⃣ show you are a well-prepared & thoughtful person 3️⃣ show that you would make a great intern One question can fall into multiple buckets. Type 1 & Type 3 questions are generally great. Type 2 questions are optimal when you are given information about your interviewer / the team you’re interviewing for ahead of time. In the span of an interview, you can usually get to multiple questions, so mix and match from these buckets as needed. How to do research for Type 1 questions: 1️⃣ Search “[company name] tech news” or “[company name] tech blog” or find the company’s YouTube channel. 2️⃣ Skim the most recent posts till you find something interesting. 3️⃣ Pick one post and skim it in its entirety. What questions are you left with after reading it? Note them down (and phrase them so that any engineer at the company could respond to the question). 4️⃣ Ask these questions during the interview, and mention that you were consuming the company’s media 🙋🏾♀️ Here’s an example of a Type 1 Question I asked when interviewing with Adobe (for a team that worked on Adobe Lightroom): I saw Lightroom just added a lens blur tool on desktop and mobile and that this tool is AI-powered. I’d love to know more about how the AI models were trained? Was it just foreground/background detection or were there other components? 🙋🏾♀️ Here’s an example of a Type 2 Question I prepared when interviewing with Google for the APM internship: How do you structure your thoughts when writing a Product Requirements Document (PRD)? What are the signs of a well- or poorly- written PRD? 🙋🏾♀️ Here’s an example of a Type 3 Question I asked when interviewing with Apple (my interviewer had interned on the team in a previous summer): What actions/traits allowed you to thrive in your internship on this team and ultimately get a return offer? That’s all for now— ~aminah. —— If you got value from this post, consider following and republishing! 🫶🏾

Great Engineers Don’t Memorize, They Solve. I once took a group of technical hiring managers out to lunch, and I couldn't help it, I had to ask... “What’s with the brutal technical interview questions? Then a long pause and I asked...Could you answer any of these if you were on the other side of the table?” They looked around at each other… smiled… and then burst out laughing. “No,” they said. Yes, you read that right. So why are we still grilling candidates like it’s a certification exam? Interviewing is nerve-wracking enough. If you want to hire smart, capable engineers, ditch the trivia and focus on how they think, how they troubleshoot, and how they work in real environments. Instead of asking: “What port does X run on?” “What’s the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption?” Ask: “How would you respond if a system alert flagged a critical issue?” “Tell me about a time you made something more secure or more reliable.” “How do you approach solving something you’ve never seen before?” You’re not hiring a walking manual. You’re hiring a problem solver. Interview for that. If you’re already doing this, great!! We need more of it. #techhiring #engineering #interviewstrategy #recruiting #TheInsideGame

The ONE Interview Question I Still Use to Separate Great Engineers from Good Ones I've interviewed hundreds of talented software engineers throughout my career, from my time at Microsoft and Expedia to my work with aspiring developers. As a hiring manager, I always looked for more than just textbook answers. I wanted to see how candidates approached truly challenging, real-world problems. Here’s one that often got candidates thinking deeply: Imagine you're a senior engineer responsible for a critical nightly batch processing job. This job aggregates data from several microservices to generate vital daily reports. Suddenly, it starts failing intermittently. Say, 1 out of every 10 runs with a generic timeout error. The code for this batch job hasn't changed in weeks. The individual microservices it pulls data from are all reporting normal health and no errors. The underlying infrastructure also seems stable according to basic monitoring. What would be your systematic approach to diagnose this elusive, intermittent bug? Beyond the obvious, what are some of the less common culprits you'd investigate in a distributed microservices environment? This isn't about one right answer, but about the thought process, the assumptions made, and the areas explored. So, how would YOU tackle this? Drop your initial thoughts, hypotheses, and debugging strategies in the comments below. I'm very curious to see your approaches. #SoftwareEngineering #TechInterview #HiringManager #ProblemSolving #DistributedSystems #Debugging #BigTech #InterviewQuestions #EngineeringChallenge #SanjeevQaziAsks

After years of building engineering teams, I've learned that the best hires often come from conversations about real projects, not theoretical problems. I love asking: 'What's a complex technical decision you made, and would you make it differently today?' This simple question reveals so much: How they think about trade-offs, how they learn from experience, and how they communicate technical concepts. You can teach someone a new framework or language, but curiosity and critical thinking are foundational. What questions do you find reveal the most about how engineering candidates operate?