Programming Interview Questions and Answers: design

Programming Interview Questions and Answers: design

Quality

Question

Energetic

N/A – Based on observation

Ready to learn

N/A – Based on observation

Takes new challenges

What would you do if you happen to finish your assigned task earlier? (Hint: read new tech, fix existing bugs, help teammate, slack off, analyze data, etc.)

Potentially independent

Tell me about a situation that required you to build your knowledge base before solving a complex problem

Results oriented

When do you consider a problem solved? How much time would you spend tweaking a solution to gain more performance? When is the performance good enough and you move to the next problem?

Growth potential

Describe a time when you had to complete a project in which you were provided with very little information or guidance

Adaptability

Describe a time when you presented a proposal or provided a service that was given an unfavorable response by stakeholders

Sincerity

Tell me about a time when you did not meet a planned milestone

Mentoring

Tell me about a time when you mentored others in your area of technical expertise

Provide an example of a time when you had to motivate others to complete a challenging deliverable.

Team Fit

Describe your most recent experience working with a virtual team.

What were the challenges you faced and how did you work through them?

Describe a situation when you led a project with a geographically or functionally diverse team

Describe how you have collaborated with others outside of your immediate team to resolve a critical issue

Tell me about a time when you experienced a major organizational change (for example, a reorganization, a new supervisor or a new procedure) that created stress. 

Company Fit

Why would you join our team and not another competitor?

What are 3 words that describe you?

What experience do you have that qualifies you for the job?

What do you consider your strengths?

What are your short term and long term goals

Technical

Given an array of numbers, write a function to remove duplicates and sort the output

In an org, given two employees, find their common manager

SQL: Given an employee table with salaries, find the employees that make more than their manager

Design: Consider an API management system. There is an API portal (say NB) that has managed services that point to a variety of backend systems (let's call them SB). The Developer apps call the NB system which checks for quotas, throttling, authentication, access, etc and if everything is good, massages the request to call the appropriate SB system. The SB response is then returned to the client. Some requests may be stateless (e.g. GetJobs()) and some may be more stateful (e.g. async call to translate speech to text). Design me a transactionID/conversationIDsystem that allows me to keep track of different requests for purposes of monitoring, measuring latency, failures, etc.

Data driven

Describe a long-term project or assignment of which you took ownership. How did you make sure each milestone was achieved in a timely manner?

You wanted to make a change on the website, but your product manager was not in favor. How would you handle this?

Tell me about a situation when you had multiple alternatives from which to choose. What steps did you take to determine the most appropriate alternative?

Read full article from Programming Interview Questions and Answers: design