Software Engineer Interview Questions, Answers & Tips

As a hiring manager, this question will help you gauge your candidate’s professional journey and gain insights into their motivations and goals, thus understanding their background, aspirations, and potential fit.

Introduction

First, you want to ask your candidate to share information about themselves. Feel free to break the ice by asking some of these questions:

• How did you become interested in software engineering and technology?
• How would you describe yourself as a professional, and how do others perceive you in a work setting?
• Beyond your career, what are some of your hobbies or passions that bring you fulfillment?

Current experience

After you’ve had a chance to get acquainted with your candidate, start diving into the specifics of their current experience. You can ask them to:

• Outline the role they are currently in, their responsibilities, and their achievements (without just reciting your resume).
• Highlight what they are the most passionate about (e.g., working with PMs to perfect the product specs, discussing with colleagues about different tech stacks, and helping others excel in their jobs and career).
• Recount one or two of their job-related projects and/or situations that map onto this job (e.g., collaborating with designers, working with legacy code, implementing best practices, introducing new tech stacks, and mentoring colleagues).

Past experience

You also want to understand the skills and knowledge your candidate has acquired over the course of their career by asking them to:

• Highlight one high-impact (preferably quantifiable) project they were involved with for each job.
• Highlight the hard and soft skills they learned from their past working experiences.
• Emphasize the initiatives they took to improve their previous company’s workflow (e.g., propose new flow to streamline sprints) or their own skillsets (e.g., engage in a hackathon with colleagues or friends).

Future expectations

Finally, you want to hear about your candidate’s aspirations and how they envision their future within your company. Ask them to:

• Describe how their existing skillsets will help them grow alongside your company.
• Convey what they hope to achieve and learn from the new job.
• Detail on products, projects, features, or initiatives they may be able to help kick off or lead in your company.

You don’t always need to include this question, but it can help you gauge your candidate’s organizational and prioritization skills.

When you ask this question, focus on:

• Whether they’re a proactive communicator and a good time planner

  Your candidate should provide a clear outline for how they plan out their time daily and weekly. They should mention the people (i.e., product managers, designers, developers, and line managers) they actively communicate with to create a realistic day-to-day schedule. They should also highlight how often they provide project updates to relevant stakeholders.

• What their daily, weekly, and monthly work activities are

  Get a clear picture of what their day-to-day work looks like. They should break down the tasks they're responsible for into different categories and indicate the percentage of time they spend working on each task category. For instance, how much time do they:

  • Spend in meetings on a weekly basis
  • Dedicate to routine work (i.e., debugging and maintenance)
  • Spend on new product features
  • Parse out for conducting work-related research

• How they strike a balance between multiple ongoing projects

  Ask your candidate to describe one or two instances where they had several projects running simultaneously and how they prioritized different tasks, made progress, met milestones, and worked on iterations based on feedback.

• How they deliver quality work with limited time

  When limited time and multiple projects are going on, they may not be able to give their 100% to their projects. Encourage your software developer candidate to expand on the following questions:

  • How do you decide which tasks should be prioritized?
  • How do you negotiate deadlines and milestones with stakeholders?
  • How do you ensure all projects will be delivered with acceptable quality?
  • At what milestones do you believe it’s ok to deliver something that’s “less than perfect”?
  • How do you decide when to go back and improve the “minimum viable projects” delivered earlier in the project's timeline?

These questions should be sufficient to help you assess your candidate’s organizational and prioritization skills. Nonetheless, depending on your candidate's experiences, you may want to ask some other relevant questions.

All of us are born with certain weaknesses and have experienced failures. So encourage your candidate to answer this question candidly. Help them frame their answers better by encouraging them to choose real scenarios, highlight personal traits, and discuss conflict resolution and teamwork experience.

You can also encourage them to use the STAR method:

• Situation — The situation they were in, including the challenges they faced (i.e. technical constraints, lack of resources, crunched time, etc.)
• Task — What role and tasks they were expected to perform in the situation
• Action — What actions they took to perform what was expected of them
• Result — What happened in the end:
  • How their action contributed to the failure
  • What actions they took to rectify the failure

In contrast to the previous question, this question will help you understand and assess the most difficult job-related challenge your candidate faced in their career. By asking this question, you’re trying to gauge what “challenging” means to your candidate and how well they can problem-solve and handle stressful situations.

Here’s the structure and content for what a good answer would entail:

Did they choose specific examples?

• Your candidate should choose a problem they resolved effectively. They should give you some context of the problem, the process and actions they took to resolve it, and the final results.

Watch out for candidates who just end up complaining about their ex-coworkers — that’d be a red flag.

What should they focus on?

• Why they think the problem was especially challenging
• Why they were determined to solve the problem, regardless of how challenging it was
• How they handled the mental and emotional stress during the process
• Whether they asked for help and collaborated with others in the problem-solving process
• How they came up with the solutions to solve the problem at hand

What to watch out for

• Complaining about having to handle the problem
• Showing how annoyed they were at the problem
• Pointing fingers at others for the problem
• Talking ill of their previous bosses or coworkers

Keep in mind that you’re trying to get a glimpse of your candidate’s past and understand how they might react to challenges should you hire them. Therefore, look for candidates who can also share examples relevant to your company.

This question has become a staple of almost every self-growth book or career planning blog. Some acquaintances may even ask you this question at a party. However, you don’t necessarily want the answer your candidate wrote down in their journal.

What you want to know is:

• Whether their goals align with your company's goals
• Whether they’ll commit to your company for a while

Did they do their research?

When interviewing for a company, competitive candidates know the importance of putting themselves in their hiring manager’s shoes. To adequately answer the “5-year-plan” question, an ideal candidate will to start by researching your company.

Here are some questions a good candidate should be able to answer before they formulate their answer:

• What are your company's mission statement and vision?
• Why is your company hiring engineers now? How do the engineering teams fit into your company's short- and long-term goals?
• How many engineers are you hiring? Why are you hiring engineers?
• What skills or needs are not being satisfied by your company’s current engineering team, if applicable?
• (If they’re applying for a senior position) What leadership qualities is your company looking for? What were the previous managers like?
• What does your company’s product roadmap look like in the next year or two?
• What is your company’s revenue goal in the next year or two? Is the company looking to launch an IPO?

Are they able to articulate their answers?

After finding out about your company's goals, product roadmap, and hiring strategies, they may share:

• How they plan to contribute to the company based on their position
• The training and development they hope to receive, implement, or both
• The shared values between them and your company
• Interesting projects that fit with your company's overall goals

As the hiring manager, you’ll be gauging your candidate’s potential commitment level, so make sure to gauge how interested and committed your candidate is to your company.

• For managerial positions: They should talk about their 5-year plan for team building, tech stack updates, product roadmaps, and hiring strategies.
• For engineers: They should mention short- and long-term projects they hope to start or participate in and mention how they’d like to help the company upgrade your technical assets in a step-by-step manner.

This question is primarily related to the software developer’s professional skills, compatibility with the company, and potential commitment to the company. Similar to the previous question, your candidate must do their homework on your company to be able to provide specific examples when answering this question.

Professional Skills

Will they excel in this job? Will they be passionate about this job? It's time for your candidate to show you that through their:

• Industry experience
• Technical skills
• Soft skills
• Key accomplishments

They should also be able to highlight their passion for the job by displaying:

• Excitement — which will fuel their performance
• Passion — which confirms that they’re interested in this job, and
• Eagerness — which will help them get through challenges at work

Company culture and shared values

Do they know about your company's culture, and will they be a good fit? Here are some culture-related points they should cover in their answer:

• They’re attracted to your company's general reputation
• They’re inspired by a specific leader in your company
• They’re passionate about your company's products and services
• They’re on board with your company's initiatives (community engagement, public endorsements, etc.)
• They admire the company's culture. Here are some specific examples:
  • Flat organizational structure
  • Transparency
  • Flexibility in participating in cross-team projects
  • User-centric mindset
  • An encouraging environment for all employees to speak up

If they feel your company’s culture aligns well with their preferences and abilities, they should be able to clarify it in the interview.

Commitment to your company

Are they passionate about the company, and will they stay committed to it? If your candidate already displayed their commitment to your company when answering “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” you don't have to stress this question too much.

If you haven't had the opportunity to evaluate their commitment to your company, the most organic way to find that out is by asking them to talk about their long-term plans in the company.

Here are some things they may talk about:

• Projects they want to start
• Potential directions they think your company can go in
• Different products or teams they want to contribute to
• Processes they’d like to participate in improving

You want to know, as confidently as possible, that they’ll be a good hire. Every single question you ask your candidate is finally related to this overarching question: "Why should we hire you?"

Unlike the more specific questions outlined above, this generic question requires a concise but powerful answer. Think about this as your candidate’s elevator pitch — they should be able to sell themselves to you in minutes.

To develop their elevator pitch, your candidate must research, plan, and consolidate. When they’re brainstorming how to address your interview questions, they need to do their research to find out about your company’s goals, culture, and expectations for the role. Once they understand your company better, their job is to develop a solid pitch that makes the strongest argument for them.