How to prepare the technical interview
A strategic approach to prepare your interviews + đ Free Notion interview tracker I used to prepare my interview
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Writing this newsletter has been a challenge for the last couple of months. I was preparing for an internal interview loop to switch teams.
I had to be very deliberate on this one. I was hired as a new grad SDE-1 at Amazon, so I didnât have a system design interview or expectation to talk from experience in other companies. Now Iâm an SDE-2 and both are expected for my level.
Iâm happy to share that I passed my interviews with the team I wanted. During the next month, Iâll share 4 posts about how to prepare these interviews:
đşď¸ How to prepare the technical interview (this post).
Initial preparation
Start with the end in mind
Letâs define the goals of the interview loop:
1/ Make the interviewerâs emotional brain feel that you are the kind of person they want to work with.
Because it was an internal transfer, I went 45 minutes overtime in 2 out of 3 loops because we ended up chatting about the product in the new team, the org structureâŚ
This may not seem too important. But believe me, nobody would dedicate the extra time to someone hard to work with.
In one of these, I had a hard time with a coding problem. But itâs not an excuse to shut down the conversation. These situations happen at work. You want to work with someone who remains a team player even in the face of a challenge.
2/ Make the interviewerâs rational brain receive enough signals so they can justify hiring you.
The goal is not this final result of the problem, but your thought process of how you got there. Solving perfectly a problem in silence doesnât mean youâll get hired.
You want to verbalize all your thought processes, like if the interviewer plugged their headphones into your brain and could listen to your inner voice.
Walk them through your thinking.
Neuroscience tells us that you are not going to get the problem right by being silent, but by talking and aiming to connect ideas. Ogi Ogas won half a million dollars in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. His strategy was talking a lot to the host before guessing, hoping to get the spark on the neural network that drives him to the right answer (listen about it here)
Understand the interviewerâs point of view
External candidates have an extra screening process (online assessments, phone screensâŚ). In my case for internal transfer, only the onsite round applies.
For each candidate doing an onsite, interviewers go through this process:
Pre-brief: Interviewers, the hiring manager, and the recruiter craft an interview schedule that covers all major competencies needed for the role.
Interview loops: This is what the candidate sees. Multiple 1-hour rounds. Depending on the company there are one or two questions. In Amazon, each 1-hour loop is half behavioral and half technical.
The goal of the interviewer is to collect signals on the competencies they were assigned in the pre-brief. They donât care too much about how amazingly you are solving another competency, they care about theirs.
Make the interview a conversation. Read between the lines of the interviewer. Donât get too fixated with going in one direction if the interviewer tries to nudge you into another.
Debrief: Each interviewer submits their feedback and hiring decision independently. Then they all get together and decide on a final decision.
The hiring decision is usually a hire/no-hire with low/high confidence.
Even if everyone aligns on the decision, the feedback and particular signals are still discussed to give visibility to the rest.
When the decision is divided, the high-confidence signals take the lead.
This is where you donât want to have any red flags as a candidate.
Prepare the small talk
If you start having a friendly conversation, it creates a halo effect in the interviewerâs eyes. Your mistakes wonât be high-confidence red flags. Your right answers will be closer to high-confidence signals.
Prepare your self-introduction.
You never jump directly to an interview question without even saying hi. Use it in your favor. Have your elevator pitch prepared sharing your name, last 2-3 experiences in reverse-chronological order, and any noteworthy product they may know about.
This is my example:
My name is Fran, Iâm an SDE-2 working on Amazonâs retail search page. I joined 2 years ago as an SDE-1 and got promoted in the middle. I have worked on customer-facing features such as the AddToCat button on the search page and some internal services. This was a great opportunity to work on a high-visibility project that was tracked at the CEO level and interact with non-tech stakeholders. I joined just out of university and now Iâm looking to work in a new environment that brings me a new perspective and grow as a well-rounded engineer.
Notice things like:
âGot promoted in the middleâ, âwant to keep growing as an engineerâ â Show Iâm intentional about my career. Appeal to the learn and be curious leadership principle (Amazonâs culture)
Interact with non-technical audiences â Itâs a common trait of seniority. Iâm marketing myself and creating a bit of halo effect.
Prepare the questions to ask after the interview loops.
Start by showing interest in the problem the company solves, not the salary or work conditions. Reserve any question about pay to the hiring manager or recruiter, an engineer would just shrug under these questions.
Ask questions you are genuinely interested in. Internal interviews are a chance to have a 1-to-1 meeting with engineers in other parts of the company.
In my case, I am part of a design review group in my current org, and I want to do the same in the new team. I socialized this interest with everyone I interviewed with. I got the information that there is no such a group with regular reviews, plus I got a few people interested in joining the group. This is useful networking.
đ Check the Notion template I used for interview preparation for a list of questions.
The interview strategy
Studying while having a full-time job and personal obligations is hard. Letâs get strategic.