Interview Questions

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Collections of General Interview Questions

Below are some general interview questions we've heard from alumni. You may not get all, or any, of these questions in an interview and you may not have been exposed to all these terms and ideas. If there is something here you do not know, take some time to research the subject.

Tools and preferences on tech

What are your favorite tools for designing, prototyping, coding?
How do you keep up with tech?
If you had to pick a new fresh stack today, what would you pick? Why?
What is the last thing you built? What was the last feature you added?

Workflow

What are your problem-solving steps?
What is your source control strategy?
How would you test your code? How would you test your design?
How would you rapid prototype an idea?
Someone found a bug in your code. How would you fix a bug in your code?

Opinions

What do you think the future of programming and the web is?
What is your most controversial technical opinion?
What are the three attributes you look for in a company before you take the job?
What do you think the future of programming, design, and the web is?
What advice would you give to an entry-level dev?
What book do you think everyone on the team should read?
If you could master one technology this year, what would it be?
How do you organize your code? (module pattern, classical, inheritance)
What are some of the advantages/disadvantages of writing JavaScript code in a language that compiles to JavaScript?
What is your favorite Github repo?

Zingers/Misc

Pretending I know nothing, Explain to me how the internet works.
What was the last new tech-related skill that you learned? Why? How?
Explain to me how to use a seat belt.
What do you do when someone disagrees with your idea?

At the end of the interview

What book do you think everyone on the team should read?
What advice would you give to an entry-level dev?
What question are you expecting us to ask?

Entry Level Interview Questions:

Technical Knowledge

What is your least/most favorite language that you use and why?
How would you improve (a technology you have used a lot)?
Explain this in javascript.
Describe or give an example of asynchronous programming.
What is the difference between a div and a span?
What is Flexbox? Contrast that to CSS Grid.
Name 3 ways to decrease page load (perceived or actual load time).
Have you ever used a grid system, and if so, what do you prefer?
Explain event delegation.
What is a closure, and how/why would you use one?
What is the event loop?
Material vs Flat design.

Web/Design

What is your CSS framework of choice and why?
Have you ever used a grid system, and if so, what do you prefer?
What is your JS Framework of choice and why?
What is a RESTful endpoint?
What exposure have you had with PaaS (Azure, AWS, Google Apps)?
What is A/B testing?
Have you ever created an app that used a Mapping API?

Back End (C#)

What is static typing?
Explain var to me.
What is your best definition of Object-Oriented Programming?
Have you heard of functional programming? How would you explain it?
What is SQL?
What are Joins?
What is Dependency Injection? Why should you use it?
Tell me about your experience with testing.

Mid Level Interview:

Database

Compare and contrast Relational and NoSQL and give use cases for both.
Have you ever used Graph databases?
Do you have any sharding experience?
What is a transactional query and when would I use it?

Javascript

Explain “this” in javascript.
What is the event loop in javascript?
What is a closure, and how/why would you use one?
explain == vs === .

General Back End

What is your least/most favorite language that you use and why?
How would you improve (a technology you have used a lot)?
Explain MVC vs MVVM vs MVP.
How much do you know about concurrency and programming?
Describe or give an example of asynchronous programming.
Have you ever encountered a scalability issue? How did you solve that?
Describe one instance that you used a caching solution before.
Compare and contrast FP and OOP.
Inheritance vs Composition.
What is tail recursion?
Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling solutions.
What is an idempotent operation?
What is Blue-green deployment?
Have you used a CI server?

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