DEV Community: Gemography

8 Hacks For Your Next Technical Interview

Zack Braksa — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 19:41:13 +0000

Here's every advice I can think of when passing technical interviews based on my experience conducting 100+ interviews as Head of Engineering at Gemography.

Don't freestyle the intro

I mean you can, but it's better if you don't. Every interview starts with some variation of "Tell me about yourself". So why not perfect it and test it before shipping it to production?

The key to a great intro is four things:

Keep it short (under 2-3 minutes)
Make sure it stands out by highlighting your top achievements or interests.
Mention why you're interested in the company.
Also, don't freestyle it.

You already know the questions (kinda)

While every technical interview is different, there is usually common questions that gets asked a lot, for example "Can you talk about project X", or "What was your experience with technology Y", or "Why are you leaving your current job".

The secret to stress-free interview is preparing these questions (and more). Once you nail them, you'll be more confident and assertive.

Mock the interview

Now that you've prepared an intro and few questions, find the nearest friend, colleague or family member with the best poker face and give them a list of questions to ask you. Gather feedback and repeat.

Talking to a mirror might also do the trick, although not as good.

Keep answers short but not too short

Short answers generally show conciseness and confidence. But not too short that the interviewer would have to ask a lot of follow up questions just to get what they need.

Stalk your interviewer

Ok maybe don't stalk anyone. Once you get that interview invite email, take few minutes to research the interviewer on Linkedin or Twitter, check their background and interests. Maybe you'll find some common topics of interest or a specific technology that they enjoy using, you might wanna bring up that technology during the interview.

Ask questions at the end

This helps show you're interested in the company, it's better if that interest is genuine. The best questions are usually the ones that are relevant to the job role, somewhat original and you couldn't answer yourself easily by reading the job description or visit their website.

Examples:

What do you like the most about working here?
What's the mission and vision of the company?
What tools do you use internally to stay in sync/aligned?
How often do you deploy to staging or production?

Don’t talk badly about ex teammates

It might be tempting to rant about a former employer, manager or teammate. While everything you'll mention might be true, it's generally not a good idea. I mean you can do it, but it's really hard to get it right (politically correct).

If you had to do it, try to keep it classy. For example: "My manager and I saw things differently when it comes to X or had different style when it comes to Y".

Practice makes perfect

Unfortunately, there is little correlation between acing interviews and being a great software engineer. The best way to get better at doing interviews is ... doing (failing?) a lot of interviews.

So the sooner you get started on that the better. If you're not able to score interviews in the first, you might want to check out my post about mistakes to avoid when making a CV.

Reading List 👇

If you're interested in reading about the thought process behind interviews, the former VP of People Ops at Google wrote an excellent book chapter (Chapter 5) about the science behind interviews.

If you're interested in advice to help you prepare, you may want to read one of the classics in the field.

Why you never hear back from companies after your job application?

Zack Braksa — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 12:50:16 +0000

It's always frustrating when you put in blood, sweat, and tears into the process of hunting for your dream job only to be faced with the harsh reality of either never hearing back from companies, or getting the dreaded rejection email template.

If you've applied to a lot of jobs, you might have seen different variations of the same thing, but it always goes something like this .

To understand why you might be getting rejected after just submitting your resume and/or cover letter, it's important to go behind the scenes and understand how companies are reviewing your job application in the first place.

How companies are reviewing your resume

After you submit your resumes, it typically lands in their ATS (Applicant Tracking System), a web platform for centralizing candidates' data.

Once your resume lands in the ATS, there is a high chance a Technical Recruiter will be the first one to look at it (it's not the case at Gemography). The average technical recruiter is typically involved in many many job openings across sometimes many departments (engineering, marketing, sales ...).

This creates few problems, one, a typical recruiter might be reviewing close to 100 resumes per day, which means they need to decide very quickly. So even though you might be a great fit for the job, if your resume doesn't have the right keywords or the exact years of experience, it'll be quickly disqualified.

Also given the limited time allocated to onsite interviews at most companies, recruiters are sort of pressure to lean more towards only passing through candidates that look great on paper.

All of this is further amplified by the fact that the average recruiter doesn't necessarily have a deep understanding of the intricacies of every role, again, given they are involved in multiple job roles across multiple departments.

So what can you do?

If you never heard back, do follow up, either by email or directly to the recruiter on Linkedin or Twitter, maybe someone else from the recruiting team or via the company's social media.

If you get rejected, ask for feedback to better understand why you got rejected and iterate on your resume, although I wouldn't advise you to do it right away, as getting rejected is always an emotionally charged experience and it's hard to see things clearly at that moment. Instead, write back to acknowledge their email, and reach out again asking for feedback a few days later.

It's also a good idea to talk to your future coworkers or manager before you even apply, this should help you better understand the role and its details. Sometimes they can even review your resume and give you feedback.

I know this all might sound like a fantasy, but if you ask nicely, keep it short, precise, and respectful of their time, you'd be amazed at what you can achieve.

To recap

Recruiters are overwhelmed and have limited time to screen resumes.
Recruiters are sometimes pressured to prioritize not wasting the interview team's time over making somewhat risky decisions.
Recruiters aren't necessarily knowledgeable about the job specifics.
Always (always) follow up after a few days.
Ask for feedback if you don't get the job.
When in doubt, reach out to your future coworkers and get more details.

Things I’ll cover next

What’s wrong with most job descriptions.
What you can do about your resume to make it more attractive.
How we’re doing things differently at Gemography.

Big thank you to Oussama Zaki for reading drafts of this and providing impeccable feedback.

Our favorite sessions from WWDC 2020

Zack Braksa — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 01:52:49 +0000

For the first time in history, WWDC didn't have a crowd, there was no cheers, and no awkward "Yeah!" during the keynote.

But it was jam-packed, like 100-sessions-jam-packed and a lot of ground-breaking news.

To name a few things we're getting this year, iOS is getting widgets. Intel is dead (Ok maybe not). Mac can now run iOS and iPadOS apps. Face ID and Touch ID are coming to the web. App Clips are now a thing and SwiftUI is an adult now.

But if you're like us and you enjoy WWDC sessions as much as the main keynote, we've got you covered with a list of our favorite sessions from this year's WWDC, here we go:

Machine Learning

Swift

UI

iOS 14

Troubleshooting

Misc

8 Hacks For Your Next Tech Resume

Zack Braksa — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 01:11:32 +0000

Here's every mistake (or advice) I can think of when building your resume based on my humble experience reviewing more than 500 resumes as Head of Engineering at a tech company.

Shortlist your skills

Please don't mention every technology, framework or language you've ever encountered or studied in college. Yes it might show that you're familiar with C#, Java, PHP, .NET, MySQL, Oracle, C, C++, HTML, Python, CCNA, TCP/IP, Photoshop.

But let's be real, it also signals you're a "jack of all trades and master of none". It might not be true, but it hurts you more than it helps you.

Break down skills by proficiency

This one is more of an advice and less of a mistake. Instead of breaking down your skills by category (e.g Databases, Frameworks, Networking ...). It's usually better to break it down by proficiency (e.g Familiar with, Experienced in ...)

Here's how it looks like in real life:

Proficient in: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Docker
Experienced with: Postgres, React, Git, Javascript
Familiar with: Kubernetes, Redis, Angular, MongoDB, ElasticSearch

Add details to experiences

If the "experiences" block on your resume is basically names of companies and dates, your chances of getting your dream job just went down by 50%.

Instead try to write 3-4 sentences under each experience explaining what the project was about, how you were involved (as an individual) and some of the things you achieved on the project. If you can mention stats (optimized page response time by 30%), that's even better.

Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes

Why should anyone care about typos if you're applying for a technical role? Well two things:

It shows a possible lack of attention to details. If you're gonna make typos on your resume, there is a high chance you gonna leave typos in emails, technical documentation, Slack and everything in between. There is exception to this rule as anything else in life, but it's more likely to be true than not.
It shows a possible lack of proficiency with whatever language you're using. What can you do about this? Besides auto-correct, use Grammarly (it's free) or have a friend review your resume before you hit send.

Move "Education" block to the bottom

This is especially true if you're applying to tech companies in Morocco or abroad. Start with your experiences (professional and personal), then move to skills and language proficiency, then finish with education. When it comes to hobbies, keep it reasonable but also original.

Keep it visually simple

If you're applying for a technical role, your resume can look as simple as a README on Github. But here's my favorite resume template of all time.

A good resume, first and foremost, should be easy to read, informative, interesting, typos-free then maybe visually beautiful.

And yes, your resume might stand out if it's all colorful and original, but then again, your experiences, skills and side projects should take care of that.

Keep it to one page (Preferably)

If you have less than 6-10 years experience. Please keep it to one page.

If you keep jumping between jobs and can't fit everything into one page, focus on the experience that are most relevant for the job role you're applying for. Also you might wanna skip some of those internships.

Make it relevant (Preferably)

Doesn't mean one resume per company, but also it doesn't have to be one resume to rule them all. If you're applying to multiple job roles or companies in different industries, it might be an interesting idea to create multiple variations.

For example if you're applying to companies in banking but also a tech startup, you might want to create one resume variation where you highlight more your experience with banking software. And then another variation where you highlight more your experience at a similar tech startup.

Our favorite blog posts from 2019

Zack Braksa — Sat, 21 Dec 2019 15:56:24 +0000

Every month, various teams at United Remote are reading a dozen or more blog posts and books. Some of us even were ambitious enough to challenge themselves to read 50 books in 2019 (and one of us even made it happen 🤯).

And like a lot of startup teams out there, we make it a sacred tradition to spam each other on Slack with links (and screenshots) of whatever we're reading in real-time 😅.

While there is certainly no limits to which topics we read about and we certainly don't limit ourselves to blog posts.

We wanted to share with you some of the developer-centric blog posts that we enjoyed reading in 2019, in the hope that they inspire you to learn more and build great things in 2020.

And of course, we would love to hear about your favorite blog posts of 2019 in the comments section.

Got a question or remark ? email me via zack[at]unitedremote.com

Top Github Repos from 2019

Zack Braksa — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 15:50:05 +0000

There is certainly no shortage of super popular projects on Github, from Tensorflow to React to Swift and ohmyzsh.

But with 2019 almost over and with 2020 on the horizon, we wanted to take a moment to appreciate some of the unknown repos that were git init in 2019 but never made it to the 10K+ stars hall of fame. (Few of them did though 👀)

This list is no way exhaustive and certainly missing a lot of great programming languages and technologies like Java, Rust, GoLang, PHP ... etc

Javascript

DevOps

Python

Swift

Ruby

Data Science

Engineering

Tools

Career

Our favorite sessions from WWDC 2019

Zack Braksa — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 15:41:37 +0000

Like every year, Apple's WWDC comes about and with it comes a plethora of new announcements and improvements across all platforms. This year was no exception. iOS got a new dark mode. macOS got a new name (and few improvements/features). We even got iPadOS now.

But it's impossible to talk about WWDC 2019 without talking about Xcode 11 and SwiftUI.

If you're like us and you enjoy WWDC sessions as much as the main keynote, we've got you covered with a list of our favorite sessions from this year's WWDC:

DEV Community: Gemography

8 Hacks For Your Next Technical Interview

Don't freestyle the intro

You already know the questions (kinda)

Mock the interview

Keep answers short but not too short

Stalk your interviewer

Ask questions at the end

Don’t talk badly about ex teammates

Practice makes perfect

Reading List 👇

Why you never hear back from companies after your job application?

How companies are reviewing your resume

So what can you do?

To recap

Things I’ll cover next

Our favorite sessions from WWDC 2020

Machine Learning

Swift

UI

iOS 14

Troubleshooting

Misc

8 Hacks For Your Next Tech Resume

Shortlist your skills

Break down skills by proficiency

Add details to experiences

Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes

Move "Education" block to the bottom

Keep it visually simple

Keep it to one page (Preferably)

Make it relevant (Preferably)

Our favorite blog posts from 2019

Top Github Repos from 2019

Javascript

DevOps

Python

Swift

Ruby

Data Science

Engineering

Tools

Career

Our favorite sessions from WWDC 2019

Xcode 11

Swift

SwiftUI

UI

iOS 13

Misc