Interviewing on jeffcarp

Questions I Ask Companies in Interviews

Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by Julia Evans’s post Questions I’m asking in interviews and Chip Huyen’s Questions to ask your interviewers section from her ML Interviews book, here are the questions I ask in interviews, targeting staff roles in ML infrastructure.

Overview

My general approach is:

Have 3-5 “primary” questions that cover the most important things.
Have a backlog of 20 questions that I can fire off as necessary. I never want to run out of questions or repeat a question in an interview.
Only ask “hard questions” after getting a job offer.

Primary Questions

What kind of scope and responsibility can I expect to have?
What are the biggest challenges you’re facing right now?
How does this team fit into the broader organization?
How big is the team and how fast is it growing?

Backup Questions

Recruiter-focused questions
- What rubrics will I be evaluated on?
- What kinds of questions should I be prepared for?
Team Alignment
- How fast are you growing and how is headcount allocated between teams?
- Who is competing for scope with your team (internal and external)?
- How many headcount do you have open right now?
Career
- When does the career ladder split between IC and management? What does that transition look like? How often do opportunities at that level come about?
- How easy is it to change teams at the company if things don’t work out?
Enjoyment
- What are the working hours like? When do most people work?
- What does your day look like?
- What do you like about working on this team? At this company?
Technology
- What’s your tech stack like?
- Do you have an oncall rotation and what is it like?
- Do you standardize tech across teams?
- What is your process for big projects? Do you write design docs? Do you have design reviews?
- How much tech debt do you have?
- How are tech teams organized? By technology or by product?
- What is the release cadence?
Leadership
- What is your decision making process?
- What are you looking for in employees and leaders?
- Who is the ultimate decision maker?

I'm Joining Waymo

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 15:38:38 -0800

Quick life update: I’ve left the Chrome team and joined Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project). I’ll be working on ML infrastructure.

It was a fantastic whirlwind 3 years working on infrastructure for Chromium and helping to–in a very small way–push the open web forward. On the team I launched wpt.fyi, a resource to help align the APIs of all browsers. I worked on syncing source code across repos. I launched a couple TensorFlow ML models. And I helped make the bug tracker quicker and more useful for everyone in the project.

3 Tips for New Technical Interviewers

Sat, 06 Jul 2019 15:00:31 -0700

One year ago I conducted my first software engineering interview at Google. In that first interview I gave, I guarantee you I was more nervous than the candidate I was interviewing. Those first few interviews were particularly nerve-wracking. A lot was on the line—I didn’t want to screw up this person’s career by being a bad interviewer!

Since then I’ve conducted a great deal more interviews and learned a lot about how to interview candidates successfully. I want to share three small tips that would have helped me improve as I was getting started.

How to Solve Every Software Engineering Interview Question

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 22:13:48 +0000

The Googleplex at dusk

This post unfortunately does not contain a secret skeleton key that will unlock every tricky Software Engineering interview question. What’s below is a framework that you can apply to every interview question that will set you up for success every time.

Software engineering interviews are not primarily about seeing if you can pull the #1 most perfect solution to a problem out of your hat. What’s more important is showing your work: demonstrating your analytical skills and problem solving ability. This is where a framework is useful.

It's OK to Make Mistakes in Coding Interviews

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 01:02:51 -0700

Imagine you’re an interviewer in a software engineering interview. The interviewee writes a method and it’s completely wrong. They go on to implement other parts of the problem, then later realize there’s a bug and come back and fix the original method.

One thing that isn’t super clear for both interview candidates and interviewers is how to treat mistakes like this. The candidate definitely made a mistake. But their final implementation is correct. Should they be penalized?

Interviewing 2 Years in: What Worked

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m almost pee-my-pants excited to announce that next week I’ll be joining the team at Braintree and Venmo to work on their JavaScript SDK.

Now that my job search is over, I want to share the lessons I learned from interviewing as a software engineer 2 years into my career. Most of these are not new (or specific to being 2 years into your career), but these points are what specifically helped me the most.