Looking for a digital job? Here you will find the most accurate and common interview questions list for IT industry in 2020. If you are wondering if finding a job in those hard times is possible check out this finding remote job guide.
- Tell Me About Yourself
- Why do you consider changing a job?
- Why do you want this position?
- Why Do You Want To Work For Us?
- What Is Your Greatest Strength?
- What Is Your Greatest Weakness?
- Can you tell me about a time when you overcame a significant challenge?
- Can you tell me about a time when you had to work with someone you weren’t compatible with?
- Which is more important: getting things done or doing things properly?
- Can You Explain Why You Changed/want to change Career Path?
- In your opinion, should testers know how to write code?
- What should you look for or check when reviewing another team member’s code?
- Describe how you handled a situation where you disagreed with a decision for technical reasons but were overruled for business reasons.
- How comfortable are you in a startup environment, or do you prefer working in a more established company?
- How do you cope when you have too much work on your plate?
- What would your skills and personality contribute to our team?
- Tell me about a recent project or process that you made better, faster, smarter or more efficient.
- If you were assigned to a project involving a new technology. How would you get started?
- What technology-related blogs, podcasts or websites do you follow? Do you share any information online?
- How do you keep your technology skills current?
- What are your favorite and least favorite technology products, and why?
1. Tell me about yourself
A basic, warm-up question which is usually asked during a recruitment interview, seemingly easy, but yet many people have problems answering it.. so where to start? What is crucial don’t give your complete career or personal history. To prepare for this question you have to identify the company’s need in a candidate and then make sure to highlight why you’ll be able to fill this need. Remember to tell something more than what you state in your resume. To answer this question it is good to use present, past and future formula. Firstly tell you about your current position, it’s scope, challenges, and accomplishments. Then mention how you got there, what is your previous experience, education. And move forward to your plans, why are you interested in this job and the reason you fit great for it. Keep it quite short and simple.
2. Why do you consider changing a job?
It is always good to say that you are looking for some new challenges but be honest – reference a specific characteristic that the company or position you are interviewing for has that you are attracted to. One that your previous employer didn’t have.
If you were let go, be honest and explain the situation. Tell what you learned from the experience because the interviewer knows you’re human, you make mistakes and just wants to see that you were able to do something about it.
Be sincere but do not give negative reasons for job changing. For example, if you couldn’t handle your previous boss – and he is the main reason you’re looking for a change you should keep it for yourself, and focus on other aspects. Remember you have nothing to gain by being negative about your current employer. Or if you are just feeling stuck and tired, try to point out some positive reason for why you want to head off in a new direction.
3. Why do you want this position?
This is a question where you can show off a little bit. Identify 3 to 5 key factors that make this role a great fit for you, and follow these 3 steps to justify it:
- Show how your skills and experience match;
- Then show your enthusiasm for the tasks that it requires;
- As the last thing – show how you fit into the culture.
What recruiter wants to verify by this question is a sense of who you really are, and how motivated are you, as well as a sense of how you’d fit and add value to the organization.
4. Why do you want to work for us (our company)?
In this question what is really important is to avoid generic answers. Do your research to get to know what makes this company unique, then point to one or two that appeal to you the most. For example company values, fast growth. Show off your knowledge by telling the interviewer what it is about them that really intrigues you or gets you excited.
5. What Is Your Greatest Strength?
Pick one or a few strengths (quality over quantity) and illustrate them by real-life example. Your strengths could include:
- Experience — with certain software, type of task, project management method (as scrum, kanban) expertise in a particular industry, a track record of working with similar products or clients, etc.
- Talents — Abilities such as developing in the desired language,
- Soft skills — Competencies such as managing a team, problem-solving, influencing, team building, negotiation, etc.
- Education/training — Relevant background on topics critical to the job — including college degrees, certifications, training seminars, online courses…
The other tactic is to point out a specific problem or task that the company has and then tell the interviewer exactly how you plan to solve this for them, using your strengths.
6. What Is Your Greatest Weakness?
This question is usually asked to identify your self-awareness and honesty. The best way to answer it is to find something you are struggling with, but you’re working to improve. For example, public speaking, focusing on details while missing the bigger picture, dealing with stress while working under pressure, etc. Choose one and focus on the progress you’re making to overcome it. Be precise but don’t talk too long.
7. Can you tell me about a time when you overcame a significant challenge?
What you need to do to answer this question is to pick an accomplishment that shows you have the qualities that the company puts value in, or are desirable for the position you’re interviewing for. Describe the situation, task, action, and final results. Set up the situation and the task that you were required to complete to provide the interviewer with background context (e.g. “In my last job as a product owner, my role was to lead the product development process in a lean (scrum way)”), then describe what you did (the action) and what you achieved (the result).
8. Can you tell me about a time when you had to work with someone you weren’t compatible with or a difficult situation and how you overcame it?
This one definitely requires some preparation. Firstly think about all the tough situations you dealt with and pick the one that brought the most positive effect (e.g. you had a co-worker in your team that was very difficult in communication, which resulted in many misunderstandings, and code rewritings, and tension between you two. You came up with the idea, and lead a feedback session, which helped to improve communication and rearrange some processes inside your team, leading to better cooperation, and less tension between you too). During the interview stay calm and professional as you tell the story (and answer any follow-up questions), spend more time talking about the resolution than the conflict, you can also mention what you’d do differently next time to show you’re open to learning from tough experiences. Focus on your soft skills, how important it is to develop them and how they help you overcome the situation.
9. Which is more important: getting things done or doing things properly?
This is a tricky one. The safe answer here is that you always strive for both, but sometimes, in real life, you have to choose. Be honest and say that there are situations where, for example, it is impossible to meet the deadline without compromising on code quality. But the most important thing is to choose the right compromise and be aware of the consequences that it brings.
10. How do you deal with pressure and stressful situations?
Here you definitely shouldn’t prove that you are stress-proof. Be honest and talk about your strategies for dealing with stress (like deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness, yoga classes, hobby, or anything that works for you). Show how you communicate about stressful situations and what you do to proactively mitigate the pressure. It is good to give one real-life example of a stressful situation and how did you deal with it.
11. Can You Explain Why You Changed/want to change Career Path?
Nowadays it is very common to shift career to digital, as many old-fashioned positions are being replaced by software and robots.
All you have to prove is that you are capable of a new role, show how your seemingly irrelevant experience can be very relevant for a position. Give a few examples of how your past experience is transferable to the new role.
12. In your opinion, should testers know how to write code?
You can obviously have your own opinion on this topic, but a good tester should stand out with solid logical thinking skills and some knowledge of programming skills, particularly for scripting. This doesn’t mean that QA testers need to be able to write programmatic code—writing code and debugging problems are the developer’s job, however, the ability to automate testing, create SQL queries and the like enable the QA tester to more effectively evaluate a web site or app.
13. What should you look for or check when reviewing another team member’s code?
If you are a developer you should talk from your own experience but note these 4 important areas:
- Formatting: Where are the spaces and line breaks? Are they using tabs or spaces? How are the curly braces laid out?
- Style: Are the variables/parameters declared as final? Are method variables defined close to the code where they’re used or at the start of the method?
- Naming: Do the field/constant/variable/param/class names conform to standards? Are the names overly short?
- Test coverage: Is there a test for this code?
14. Describe how you handled a situation where you disagreed with a decision for technical reasons but were overruled for business reasons.
Oftentimes business decisionmakers dictate the rules for IT departments and technologies they have to use. This happens due to various reasons – either from company resources, past experience and risk aversion for trying out new risky tech novelties. If you believe there is a better way to build company IT products then you should be able to strongly back-up your beliefs with arguments and examples. You should outline the pros and cons associated with the arrangement made by business executives and it is very important to have it in writing (the best is email). The final decision bears on the manager but for you what matters is that you did your job and that presented good professional acumen.
15. How do you cope when you have too much work on your plate?
Organize, prioritize, and delegate work (for a leader, management positions). It is always good to start with the to-do list and task prioritization. If you are a team leader or manager, you can then delegate things that can be delegated, and start working on your own tasks, starting from getting simple tasks done in the first place. It is worth mentioning that you can focus for a long time to get things done, but also that you care about your needs (like some nice lunch or 10 minutes stretching/short walk break), which clears your mind and makes work more efficient.
16. Tell me about a recent project or process that you made better, faster, smarter or more efficient.
What you need to prove by answering this question is that you understand the big-picture impact of your work. Choose a few past projects and explain the challenges you overcome, the efforts you made and the results you delivered.
17. If you were assigned to a project involving new technology. How would you get started?
This question is asked to give insight into how you handle technology products with which you have less expertise. Explain what steps would you take to overcome a knowledge gap and ensure that you still get things done on time. It’s best to talk from your own experience, even if it is from the beginning of your career and complete the story of the steps you would have to take if you would have to face such a challenge now.
18. If I was not a tech person, how would you explain (a relevant technology) in simple terms to me?
IT plays a crucial role in almost every company, so the ability to communicate with non-technical people is a must. Avoid obscure acronyms and jargon, break down a complicated process into small steps. Expect to tackle a “dumb” follow-up questions to get a sense of how you interact with non-tech colleagues.
19. What are the benefits and drawbacks of working in an Agile environment?
This question is asked to get to know not only your level of understanding of this popular methodologies but also your attitudes toward collaboration and communication in a team. Tell from your experience, and if you don’t have much, read some articles about the most popular agile methodologies (SDLC, Scrum, Kanban).
20. How do you keep your technology skills current?
You can show off a little bit, tell about blogs and forums you are reading, online courses you have taken, hackathons you joined or personal IT projects. This question is asked to check on your enthusiasm for the job, as well as open up a conversation about professional development.
21. What are your favorite and least favorite technology products, and why?
You can talk about hardware, operating system and software your company uses, this tech interview question helps evaluate your overall enthusiasm and knowledge. Point out advantages and disadvantages of certain tools, tell what do you admire (e. g. solid engineering, sleek design, intuitive user experience or another aspect of good technology) but emphasize that this is your subjective opinion.
22. What qualities do you think are most important in a developer [or another relevant position]?
A question like is asked to reveal how you feel about the position and what would bring to it. Make this answer a nice balance of technical abilities as well as soft skills such as problem-solving, attention to detail and communication.
Summary
Whenever we are put in front of very hard tasks or situations the best way to deal with them is good preparation and management. A career switch or new job search feels like a mountain to climb at first but if you take a closer look then you will see there are already some paths paved by others to show you the way. Hopefully, with our guide, you will be more prepared for IT interview questions and review process.
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