DEV Community: SunDevs

4 types of technical interviews to hire developers

Fabián Rodríguez — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 15:29:10 +0000

Software companies are constantly finding the best way to evaluate developers, and despite every company has a different process we can find these commons ways to do it:

Video interviews

In this kind of interviews, you can ask theoretical questions to the developer about a specific programming language or technology, for example:

Can you describe and explain the lifecycle of React?
What is the difference between false and nil in Ruby?

As you can see, these questions don't need the candidate to write code, just answer the question in a verbal way.

Case interviews

You can use this kind of interview to show a real scenario to the candidate, and ask questions about how to solve specific problems of that application.

For example, if you are testing a front-end developer, you can ask him about how to code in CSS and JS a complex menu.

Coding interviews (to make at home)

As you can see in the title, these kinds of projects are about challenging the programmer to make little projects that can be completed in 2 days or less. After that, developers need to send you a repository with code to later be analyzed with someone in the team.

Whiteboard interviews

In these interviews, you can invite developers to the offices, and in a blackboard, ask them to solve an algorithm or problem. The objective is to check how he can solve it. Nowadays you can use a platform for real-time coding.

A disadvantage is some developers can get nervous and not solve the problem correctly.

Let me know what other types of interviews you know or implement your company to hire software developers.

How to hire Ruby on Rails developers (12 questions for a job interview)

Fabián Rodríguez — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 15:25:38 +0000

In another post, I was documenting some of the interview questions that I think are important to us when we are trying to hire iOS developers. In this case, I'm going to expose some questions for an interview for Ruby on Rails developers.

Ruby language

What is the difference between a class and a module?
What are the three levels of method access control for classes and what do they mean?
What does "self" mean?
Explain what singleton methods are. What is Eigenclass in Ruby?
What is the difference between false and nil in Ruby?

Rails Framework

What is the Asset Pipeline?
Explain the "Active record" pattern.
What is a Polymorphic Association in Rails?
Explain the difference between optimistic and pessimistic locking in Rails.

Security

What is the CSRF? How do Rails protect an application against this security flaw?
How should we store insecure data such as passwords?
Why do we need to use HTTPS instead of HTTP?

Let me know what other questions you would use for an interview to hire Ruby on Rails developers.

3 necessary soft skills to get hired as a software developer

Fabián Rodríguez — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 14:28:01 +0000

In my experience working as a software developer for more than 6 years, I've had to work in environments in which communication has been the key to have successful projects. Today, I want to share with you these tips:

Negotiation: Sometimes, we do not agree with some co-workers about how to solve a technical issue, so, having the ability to negotiate the params of a controversial task is key to solving it.

A practical way to do it is talking with a technical leader, I mean, an intermediary that can help you and your co-worker fix the issue. Also, the scorecards used in SCRUM are a mechanism that can help all the team to decide what is the better focus and give you the opportunity to argue why you are choosing an option.

Be concise: A good practice to be effective in daily meetings is to have established order, for example, in SCRUM, all members of the team need to answer three key questions. But it's really important that each member.

Assertiveness: In some companies, having a knowledge base it's really important to document the more relevant concepts and to have order in each area, so, to have good writing skills to create documents with assertive content it's very relevant.

This is really useful because a lot of companies use Jira or tools like Notion.so to create documentation about weekly meetings, and other things, so, in the process of hire software developers, the companies pay a lot of attention to these soft skills.

The main reason to stop making whiteboard interviews to hire developers

Fabián Rodríguez — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 14:19:59 +0000

The whiteboard interviews have been very relevant for a lot of companies when they are looking to hire software developers, however, can be counterproductive; here are my arguments:

Whiteboard interviews are focused on the performance of the candidate, so, when someone is looking at what are you doing the step to step, we can get nervous, and the anxiety could cause that we can't to think correctly.

This is exposed in a study published in November of 2020 from North Carolina State University and Microsoft [1]. They found that the technical interviews currently used in hiring for many software engineering positions test whether a job candidate has performance anxiety rather than whether the candidate is competent at coding.

What do you think about this?

[1] Does stress impact technical interview performance?

What Factors Can Slow Down the Process of hire remote software developers?

Fabián Rodríguez — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 14:14:00 +0000

Each company has a process to hire developers, but a lot of these companies not only has similar processes but also make de same mistakes

Too many interview steps.
A great deal of time between each stage.
Technical tests take a lot of time for developers and the company.
Lack of Decision-Making in the short-term.

There are many things that you can do to avoid using a lot of time in this process. For example, instead of projects at home, you can use automated technical tests.

Also, you can reduce the number of the steps of your interview process, so it's very useful to identify what of your stages is not so necessary to hire developers.

Do you know other factors that can put slow your hiring process of software developers?

How to hire iOS developers (9 questions for a job interview)

Fabián Rodríguez — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 13:55:26 +0000

Right now, a part of the interview process that I've done to hire iOS developers has consisted of asking candidates about their experiences using UIKit, the knowledge of the MVC or delegate pattern, and questions about the core of the Swift programming language.

Some questions that I've used in the interview have been the next:

What is the init() method for in Swift?
What is the difference between Let and Var?
What is optional chaining?
What are Lazy stored properties and in which case are they useful?
What is Enum used for?
What is a Dictionary?
Explain the Adapter and Memento patterns in Swift.
What are the differences between Struct and Class?
How can you make a property optional?

Also, I ask about their experience with:

Apple guidelines.
CocoaPods
Keychain

A project at home as a complement to interview

A way to complete this interview is by testing the coding skills of the candidate through a project to make at home. I think a good project is to make a "news reader" where the programmer will need to implement:

A screen to display the news list.
A screen with the details of the news with category and author.

In this application, the developer will need to consume an API and optimize images, downloading, putting them in the cache, and getting them in an asynchronous way.

Let me know what other questions you would use for an interview.

4 challenges of hiring developers in Latin America

Fabián Rodríguez — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 13:40:37 +0000

When companies from the United States are looking for a partner for the service of IT Staff Augmentation in Latam, usually have a lot of doubts about how the culture can be a barrier or even the language can be difficult for Latinos.

I work for a company in Latam offering this kind of services, and I've compiled the top concerns of the companies around this topic:

Legal aspects of hiring: The legal procedures for hiring foreign people are one of the first questions that come up when trying to build an IT development team. In the case of the United States, it is relatively simple since it is through the W8 form provided by the Internal Revenue Service (whose acronym is IRS) that companies can declare that they are hiring a self-employed person who also lives outside the United States.
Time zone: One of the great fears of companies when hiring outside the country is that the time difference will interrupt the flow of work. However, the United States, Canada, and Latin America are very similar in this aspect, as an example, cities like Dallas, New Orleans, or Houston in the United States or Winnipeg and Baker Lake in Canada have exactly the same time zone as Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.
English language: The native language of most of Latin America is Spanish, but government policies in each country make it mandatory to learn English not only in school but also in universities
Education: In Latin America as well as in the rest of the world, computer science education is a relevant issue. And this group of countries is home to many renowned universities throughout the continent for the study of engineerings, such as the National University of Colombia or the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina.

How to hire Angular developers (10 key questions for a job interview)

Laura Villa — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:56:34 +0000

When you are going to hire Angular developers you should filter the candidates that know the Angular’s core concepts, in a beginning stage, and afterwards filter them through a technical exam, for instance, a project that helps us prove the candidate’s knowledge. Let’s see some fundamental interview questions for an Angular developer:

What is a dependencies injection in Angular?
What isAngular Ivy?
What is service-side rendering? How is it possible to implement it in Angular?
What are the lifecycle hooks and which are available?
What are the types of directives in Angular?
What are the observables and what can we do with them?
What is defer change?
What is a class decorator?
What is binding?
What is the purpose of @NgModule?

How to hire ReactJs developers (10 key questions for a job interview)

Laura Villa — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:53:48 +0000

When hiring React developers it's important to know the project’s requisites that the person is going to work on. You can use methods like live coding or assigning a project with very specific characteristics so the candidate resolves them. This is a way to get to know if the programmer implements good habits or not. Let’s take a look at some questions you can ask a candidate:

What is State?
What are the differences between state and props?
How doesVirtualDOM work and what are the differences with Real DOM?
What is the render() method used for in React?
What are the lifecycle’s methods in React?
What is the difference between Stateful Components and Stateless Components?
What are HOC (High Order Components)?
What is Redux and which are its components?
Explain Redux’s components
What are hooks? Mention how do useState and useEffect work

This is a process that will help the developers to know if they can have a good fulfillment in the project.

How to accomplish a team's objectives with augmented staff?

Laura Villa — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:40:15 +0000

Augmenting temporary staff offers companies an outer perspective to help products or service’s development. Because of this, some team parts have never worked together before, they are worried that the goals of the team will be impacted. So, it's very important to plan the objectives in an efficacious way. What can you do?

Separate objectives and tactics:

These concepts don't mean the same. Objectives refer to the aims that are to be reached with the project, while tactics are the procedures that help us complete those objectives. Both need to be established in the projects and all the team must comprehend and apply them.

Execute a DevOps culture:

DevOps culture refers to a set of practices that mix software development and IT operations, its goal is to shorten the life cycle of the systems development and achieve a continuous shipment with a high software quality. With this method teams will be more aligned, less stalled and will take part in more phases of the product’s life cycle. Creating a DevOps culture increases productivity.

Define communication ways:

Each team member comprehends their roles and goals, several communication ways need to be set and everybody has to know them. Using tools like Slack or Skype and choosing a software for project management, like Jira Software Cloud will help with team's communication. Team leaders need to guarantee that both the internal and augmented staff use the instruments to have constant communication.

Finally

The team’s objectives in IT Staff Augmentation projects can seem hard to reach, nevertheless, following these steps will make it simpler to achieve the objectives of the project.

How to hire NodeJs developers (10 key questions for a job interview)

Laura Villa — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:32:59 +0000

Hiring Node.js developers can be a hard task because there are a lot of solutions and frameworks in the market that allow us to write code in the back-end such as Sails, NestJS, Feather or Express. Save some time by asking the developer questions about all those frameworks’ base, like the next 10 key questions for a position as a Node.js developer:

What is the event loop in Node.js?
What are Streams?
What is the purpose of “module.exports”?
How can you configure properties for different environments (production, development, etc.)?
How do you obtain the variables and property values passed through URL (GET method)?
What is a middleware?
What is an EventEmitter?
What is package.json and what is it used for?
When should we not use Node.js?
What is the difference between blocking and nonblocking code?

When to choose IT Staff Augmentation over Project Outsourcing?

Laura Villa — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:24:22 +0000

In the IT industry there’s a continuing tendency of trying to reduce costs and enhance the operative efficiency of projects; that is why staff augmentation and project outsourcing are a great solution for companies that try to resolve their technological requirements.

The main difference between IT staff augmentation and project outsourcing is that in this last, the supplier has the project’s control and the responsibility of the management of the project and presents the final product. On the other side, with staff augmentation you will have in-house software developers, who will work beside your company’s team to get results.

Considerations for choosing IT Outsourcing

If you don't count with an engineering team and with experience to develop the software with the features you require.
If the worth you need of a product is essential for the business and the in-house engineering squad can’t provide it.

Considerations for choosing IT Staff Augmentation

For projects that needs specific skills that you don't have in your team.
When you want to growth your response time.
If you don’t need long term agreement with software engineers.

Hybrid approach

With a hybrid approach can divide engineering teams according to the needs and responsibilities, since it can handle a project through outsourcing and develop another part of the project in-house. This approach requires a remote team adjustment.