New Interview Questions for Senior Software Engineers

I’m putting together some practice interview questions for a friend who lost his job. I thought it’d be useful to crowd-source some questions from you, Dear Reader.

These questions should be more software design focused, less technical trivia like my previous two lists of interview questions:

UPDATE: I think we all agree (or at least we should) that if you go into an interview tomorrow and you look across the table and the interviewer has simply printed out this list and is reading from it, that you should excuse yourself and run. This isn’t a “guide to how to interview” nor is this meant to me a “best practices for engineers” list. It’s simply a collective brain-dump of stuff that someone who’s been in the business of developing software for money for 10 or so years should have some passing familiarity with. Of course, it’s assumed that the interviewer is able to detect BS. This isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a trivia contest. If you’re going to get a job (or you’re looking for hire someone for a job) it’s ultimately more important to understand if someone can Solve Problems and if Their Head is Screwed on Straight. Take it with a grain of salt, friends, remember, you found it on the Internet. – @shanselman

Here’s what I have so far.

• What is something substantive that you’ve done to improve as a developer in your career?
• Would you call yourself a craftsman (craftsperson) and what does that word mean to you?
• Implement a <basic data structure> using <some language> on <paper|whiteboard|notepad>.
• What is SOLID?
• Why is the Single Responsibility Principle important?
• What is Inversion of Control? How does that relate to dependency injection?
• How does a 3 tier application differ from a 2 tier one?
• Why are interfaces important?
• What is the Repository pattern? The Factory Pattern? Why are patterns important?
• What are some examples of anti-patterns?
• Who are the Gang of Four? Why should you care?
• How do the MVP, MVC, and MVVM patterns relate? When are they appropriate?
• Explain the concept of Separation of Concerns and it’s pros and cons.
• Name three primary attributes of object-oriented design. Describe what they mean and why they’re important.
• Describe a pattern that is NOT the Factory Pattern? How is it used and when?
• You have just been put in charge of a legacy code project with maintainability problems. What kind of things would you look to improve to get the project on a stable footing?
• Show me a portfolio of all the applications you worked on, and tell me how you contributed to design them.
• What are some alternate ways to store data other than a relational database? Why would you do that, and what are the trade-offs?
• Explain the concept of convention over configuration, and talk about an example of convention over configuration you have seen in the wild.
• Explain the differences between stateless and stateful systems, and impacts of state on parallelism.
• Discuss the differences between Mocks and Stubs/Fakes and where you might use them (answers aren’t that important here, just the discussion that would ensue).
• Discuss the concept of YAGNI and explain something you did recently that adhered to this practice.
• Explain what is meant by a sandbox, why you would use one, and identify examples of sandboxes in the wild.
• Concurrency
  • What’s the difference between Locking and Lockless (Optimistic and Pessimistic) concurrency models?
  • What kinds of problems can you hit with locking model? And a lockless model?
  • What trade offs do you have for resource contention?
  • How might a task-based model differ from a threaded model?
  • What’s the difference between asynchrony and concurrency?
• Are you still writing code? Do you love it?
• You’ve just been assigned to a project in a new technology how would you get started?
• How does the addition of Service Orientation change systems? When is it appropriate to use?
• What do you do to stay abreast of the latest technologies and tools?
• What is the difference between “set” logic, and “procedural” logic. When would you use each one and why?
• What Source Control systems have you worked with?
• What is Continuous Integration?  Have you used it and why is it important?
• Describe a software development life cycle that you’ve managed.
• How do you react to people criticizing your code/documents?
• Whose blogs or podcasts do you follow? Do you blog or podcast?
• Tell me about some of your hobby projects that you’ve written in your off time.
• What is the last programming book you read?
• Describe, in as much detail as you think is relevant, as deeply as you can, what happens when I type “cnn.com” into a browser and press “Go”.
• Describe the structure and contents of a design document, or a set of design documents, for a multi-tiered web application.
• What’s so great about <cool web technology of the day>?
• How can you stop your DBA from making off with a list of your users’ passwords?
• What do you do when you get stuck with a problem you can’t solve?
• If your database was under a lot of strain, what are the first few things you might consider to speed it up?
• What is SQL injection?
• What’s the difference between unit test and integration test?
• Tell me about 3 times you failed.
• What is Refactoring ? Have you used it and it is important? Name three common refactorings.
• You have two computers, and you want to get data from one to the other. How could you do it?
• Left to your own devices, what would you create?
• Given Time, Cost, Client satisfaction and Best Practices, how will you prioritize them for a project you are working on? Explain why.
• What’s the difference between a web server, web farm and web garden? How would your web application need to change for each?
• What value do daily builds, automated testing, and peer reviews add to a project? What disadvantages are there?
• What elements of OO design are most prone to abuse? How would you mitigate that?
• When do you know your code is ready for production?
• What’s YAGNI? Is this list of questions an example?
• Describe to me some bad code you’ve read or inherited lately.

Your thoughts? I’ll add good questions from the comments throughout the day.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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