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These are some questions we can ask during phone screens and interviews.

Note that most of these are used to identify technical skills. However, there are many non-technical skills and traits that we'd also like to identify (although they tend to be harder to determine objectively):

  • Ability to work with other team members
  • Ability to learn
  • Ability to teach/mentor
  • Empathy
  • Curiosity
  • Courage
  • Communication
  • Entrepreneurial mindset
  • Gets things done
  • Discipline
  • Sense of purpose
  • Leadership

General

  • What interests you about this position?
  • How would you describe your ideal boss?
  • How would you describe your ideal work environment?
    • What do people in that environment do to create/keep their culture?
  • How do you define success?
    • Do you see yourself as a success?
  • What aspects of your current job are you most passionate about?
  • How do you currently affect the bottom line at your company?
  • Where do you see the IT industry in 3 years?
  • What did you like least about your last manager?
  • Have you ever been fired?

Learning

  • What are you passionate about (work-wise)?
  • What are you currently (interested in) learning?
  • What ways do you like to learn new things?
  • How do you stay up to date on technologies?
  • What are some of the books you’ve read recently?
    • They don’t have to be work-related.
  • Could you tell me about the last time you had to learn a brand new skill?
    • How did you go about learning it?
    • How long did it take?
    • What was the toughest part of the process?

UNIX

  • What arguments do you prefer for the ps command?
  • How would you show the PID of something named "xyz" running?
    • How would you avoid the grep process being shown a well?
  • How does the kill command work? (most people don't get this quite right)
  • How would you restart Apache?
    • When would you have to restart Apache?
    • When would you NOT have to restart Apache?
  • Explain file permissions.
  • What is the sticky bit?
  • Where's the difference between a soft link and a hard link?
  • What is an inode?
  • If you do ls, you can see files, directories, and what else?
  • If you accidentally delete a file, but another process still has it open, how can you rescue it?
  • What command(s) can you use to show what process has a file open?
    • Answer: lsof
    • Answer: fuser
  • How can you see what process is listening on a port?
    • lsof -i tcp:$PORT (Linux)
    • fuser -v $PORT/tcp (BSD)
    • netstat -planet | grep $PORT (Linux)
    • netstat -n | grep LISTEN | grep $PORT (Mac)
  • What are the advantages of Nginx over Apache?
  • All I/O is through "files" in the file system, except for what?
  • What is RAID?
    • What are the RAID levels?
    • BONUS: Why does nobody use levels 2, 3, or 4?
  • What does the ldd command do?
  • Name a few UNIX commands you use that you think other people should use more.

Networking

  • Can you explain how DNS works?
  • When should you NOT use a CNAME DNS record?
  • What is a proxy?
    • What is a reverse proxy? (people have a hard time putting this into words)
  • How does a switch work?
  • How does a router work?
  • What’s the difference between TCP and UDP?
  • Name some commonly used TCP and UDP ports, and their associated protocols.
  • What's the difference between IP and UDP?
  • Can you name the 7 layers of the OSI model?
    • Can you name the 4 layers of the TCP/IP stack?
  • How does a TCP 3-way handshake work?
  • What's an MTU?
    • Why is it important?
  • What is a VLAN?
  • How can you find a server's IP address?
    • How can you find a server's public IP address? (kind of a trick question)
  • What challenges do self-signed SSL (TLS) certificates present?
  • How does a system get its IP address?
  • How does DHCP work?
  • How does ARP work?
    • What is a gratuitous ARP? When/why would you send one?
  • Explain CIDR and CIDR notation.
  • What is the subnet mask for a 24-bit subnet?
  • What is the loopback address? What is it used for?
    • What is the IPv6 loopback address?
  • Can you name all 3 private IPv4 address ranges? (the 20-bit block will be trickiest to recall)
    • Which RFC defines them?
    • Bonus points if you can name a 4th.
    • Bonus points if you can name the IPv6 private address range.

Web

  • What's the problem with inline CSS?
  • What are the advantages and disadvantages of HTTP being stateless?
    • How can a web app maintain state on top of a stateless protocol?
  • How do the HTTP methods correspond to the CRUD verbs?
    • Bonus points for knowing where Rails CRUD actions don't work as the HTTP methods are intended.
  • What are the parts of a URL?
  • What's the difference between a URL and a URI? (this is really just a trivia question)
  • Can you describe the HTTP request/response cycle?
  • What tools can you use to view the HTTP request/response cycle?
  • What does an HTTP request look like?
  • Can you name some HTTP request and response headers?
  • Which HTTP methods are idempotent? Which are NOT idempotent?
    • What does "idempotent" mean?
  • Which HTTP methods are "safe"?
    • What's the problem with GET requests that make database changes?
  • What happens when you enter google.com in a web browser?
    • Tell me everything that happens between your computer, Google's servers, and any other Internet devices that are involved.
    • Start with a 1-minute overview, then we can dig deeper.
    • (This is also helpful to see if someone can be consise, while still being able to dig in deeper.)

Cloud

  • Do you know what a 12-factor app is?
  • What are some factors that need to be considered when deploying an app to the cloud?
  • What's the difference between REST and SOAP?
  • What is HATEOAS?
  • What are some solutions to the challenges of versioning APIs?
  • Do you know what the CAP theorem is?
  • What are the trade-offs of NoSQL versus SQL?
  • What AWS services are you familiar with?
  • Why should you not put databases on VMs and containers?
    • Answer: performance issues (still)
    • Answer: possibility of accidentally taking down due to configuration issues

OOP

  • What is Object Oriented Programming? (not getting "polymorphism" very often)
    • What is polymorphism?
    • What is encapsulation?
  • What's the difference between an object and a class?
  • Can you have object-orientation without classes?
  • What does SOLID stand for?
    • What does the single responsibility principle (SRP) mean?
    • What is the open/closed principle?
    • What is the Liskov substitution principle?
    • What is the interface segregation principle? (probably the hardest of these)
    • What is the dependency inversion principle?
  • What is the Law of Demeter?
  • What problems can inheritance cause?
    • How can you mitigate those problems?
    • What's the problem with multiple inheritance?
  • Can you explain cohesion and coupling?
  • What is a god class?
    • How can you mitigate the issues with having a god class?
  • What is a pattern?
    • Explain one of the patterns you use.

Dev

  • What is the DRY principle?
    • What are some things to be aware of when DRYing up code?
  • What’s your favorite programming language?
    • What do you like about it?
    • What are the biggest problems you have with that language?
  • How do you feel about commenting code?
  • What’s the difference between git merge and git rebase? (not many are getting this)
  • Why should you not use regular expressions to parse HTML?
  • Can you explain what big-O notation is? (not many are getting this one quite right)
  • What is SQL injection?
    • How can you prevent SQL injection?

Architecure

  • What even is software architecture?
  • What are the pros and cons of micro-services?
  • Have you used message queues to communicate between components?
  • Have you used a service bus?

DevOps

  • Have you used Ansible, Puppet, or Chef?
  • Have you used Docker?
  • Have you used Kubernetes?
  • Have you used Terraform?
  • Have you used any other DevOps tools?

Agile

  • What does Agile mean to you?
    • How does this compare to the Agile Manifesto?
    • Which Agile methodologies do you know best?
  • What are the pros and cons of Agile methodologies (in general, and particular methodologies)?
  • Which Agile practices do you like/dislike?
  • What's the purpose of a retrospective?
  • What's the purpose of standup meetings?
    • What are the biggest anti-patterns that happen with standup meetings?
  • Have you pair programmed?
    • How do you feel about pair programming?
    • Have you worked in a mob/ensemble?
  • What are the benefits of TDD?
    • What does the “driven” in TDD mean?
    • What’s the advantage of test first?
  • What is a code smell?
    • Can you name a code smell?
  • What is refactoring? (most people miss the part about not changing external behavior)
  • What is continuous delivery? How do you get there?

Management / Leadership

  • Can you explain the difference between management and leadership?
  • How have you gone about improving your teams' processes?
  • How do you ensure that you're neither micro-managing nor being too hands-off?
  • How do you offer criticism?
    • How do you best receive criticism?
      • (Hopefully this will prompt them to talk about offering criticism differently to different people.)
  • What is your approach to delivering bad news?
  • How do you prioritize your time managing a team?

Behavioral

  • What kinds of things do you do to improve how you do your job?
  • How would your most recent teammates describe you?
  • What do people assume about you that is incorrect? Why?
  • Talk about a fun problem that you've solved in the past that you're proud of.
  • What is the most original, innovative solution you’ve ever created?
  • How do you take criticism? How do you like to receive criticism?
  • Could you tell us about a time where you had to make an unpopular decision?
  • How do you convince teammates that you're right?

Closing

  • Are there any questions you wished we would have asked?
  • How would you rate me as an interviewer?