3 Phases Software Engineer Interview Questions to Hire the Right Developer
Having experienced software engineers is a dream that most software production firms would love.
What’s more, retaining them could be an uphill task considering just how much of a hotcake they have become.
Now, if you are not a software specialist, you may need to do a little bit of research to find the right person who can pose relevant questions to the interviewee in order to gauge just who is the right man/woman to help your business grow.
Preparing for the Interview
In this kind of interview, you will need to do a bit of preparation in order to understand the environment under which you may be setting your terms.
In this area, you will have to highlight your project specifications so that only the right person with experience in doing such-like tasks makes the cut. Instead of speaking in general terms, you would prefer to conduct an interview with specific requirements for the job.
Key in this stage is to identify all your major activities of the project and ensure the interviewee can address a majority of them.
Two, you will have to research to determine the right budget that can be agreed between you and the software engineer. Different areas have different budget rates. Also, every project is unique and may have a different budget based on unique requirements.
When sourcing for a software engineer, you may want to establish a deadline and just stick to it. Whether you need a freelancer or an in-house arrangement, you will have to set the deadline so that the developers work within a frame.
The Interview Itself
Now that you are ready to begin the software engineer interview questions that will land you the right person to take you to the next level, these are the phases that you may find quite vital.
First Phase
The most important question to ask at this stage is how the interviewee handled a past software development project and let them explain how they ensured they executed it successfully.
Also at this stage, you will need the interviewee to answer on the kind of obstacles they met during the course of the project and how s/he managed to handle them.
This could also be the right time to inquire from them whether they use agile software development process. This owes to the fact that agile is the trending software development process preferred by developers.
Second Phase
You will need to ask the engineer about what s/he knows about multithreading and how they can leverage the tool to enhance the performance of the software to be developed at this stage.
Also to ask here is what the software engineer knows about Unit Testing and Test Driven Development (TDD). This is especially important in that unit testing will eliminate coding and logic flaws in the project and ensure only the right actions are performed by the software.
Your software engineer should appear to prioritize these tests due to the huge role of eliminating bugs that they play in the entire software development lifecycle.
Third Phase
How familiar is the engineer with OOP analysis and design?
Now, this is perhaps one of the most important quizzes as the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is the basis of most programming languages like C++, Java, VB among others.
This essentially means how to classify the different components of the program. For example, if your program is a car, the components could be the wheels, the chassis, the engine, the body and the electronics among others.
Another important question to ask the software engineer would be how s/he detects bugs on an application and how often s/he debugs.
Normally, developers use debugging tools but the value of this question will lie in whether the developer can fix bugs without messing with the remaining part of the code and logic.
Conclusion
Getting the right fit for the role of software engineer for your project may turn out to be a real hassle, however, with these key questions, you can be sure to be on the right track should the interviewee answer them satisfactorily.
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