Cracking a technical interview

Strengthen your fundamentals

Once you walk in through that door, there would most definitely be tough situations; problems which you would never have faced earlier in your life. In all such cases, your fundamentals would back you up and definitely help you get close, if not solve the problem altogether.

Are you sure what a Foreign Key is? What is a Static Variable? Make sure you have your basics clear, here are few questions for your reference.

Know thyself

Most technical interviews begin with a simple question, “Tell us about yourself”. Unfortunately, this particular simple question has no straightforward answer. It’s an opportunity to market yourself and focus on things which are not on your resume.  Tell them how good a team player you are and how you drove your most recent project to completion with ease.

The Team Player

No matter how efficient you are as an individual, companies prefer team players over lone wolves. Try to emphasize on how well you will work in a team. If you can give an example of how well you did as a team in your recent projects or internships, it will definitely earn you extra points in the mind of the interviewer.

Think Aloud

When a technical question has been rolled out to you, chances are that you need to think and come up with a proper approach in order to solve it. If you are unable to solve it, and that’s the first thing that you speak, you would probably leave a bad impression! The trick here is to think aloud- mention what is going inside your head, so that the interviewer knows your thought process. Taking the correct approach is always more important than blatantly solving problems.

If you are asked to write a program, let the interviewers know how you plan to go about doing it. Try and explain your steps and why you are taking those! It’s good to write some pseudocode before writing the actual program, but make sure you let the interviewers know. Always remember to test your code for bugs.

Be Honest, They’re Smart!