Interviewing for any role can be challenging. Interviewing for a software development role might be one of the most difficult processes in the professional world.
Technologies change daily, and when combined with different economic forces, the job market is very competitive and difficult to navigate. Preparation is key.
As a technical leader at CarMax, I’ve been involved in hiring engineers. But I obviously didn’t start my career as a dev leader. I’ve also sat on the other side of the table as a hopeful candidate as I worked my way through different roles and companies.
In this post, I’ll try to help focus interview prep and cover both the manager and candidate perspectives, given that I’ve lived it from both sides.
Everyone’s experiences will be unique. If you Google “interview prep”, you will get a long list of varied opinions and tactics folks use.
The purpose of this post is to help share some experiences and guidance for folks interested in entering the professional world of software development. I’m going to walk through interviewing from a manager’s perspective, and then go through general interview prep topics like technical, behavioral, and company-specific. I’ll finish the post with a general discussion of the current job market.
In my professional role, I’ve had the opportunity to conduct interviews and make hiring decisions for my team.
In the process of doing these interviews, I noticed that understanding both the manager’s role and the candidate’s role is equally important for success.
Early on in my career, I remember approaching interviews focused more on the actual daily work versus how to interact with a team. As a candidate, it’s easy to focus on solving the coding problems and being an expert, vs. how you can make the team dynamics better overall. When new individuals join a team, how they interact with the team is just as important as whether they can deliver exceptional results.
Here’s what I’m looking for a candidate to bring to the table:
Most frequently, with interview prep, individuals focus on skills. Many focus on mastering algorithms, data structures, and CS concepts in a way that can quickly solve problems. Usually, this is through LeetCode problems or some other platform. Many books and videos exist to help people focus on these skills.
However, technical skills are only one part of what a manager looks for. Yes, you need to have technical proficiency, but the way you do the job and the way you operate on a team are just as important.
Managers are looking for a variety of things in any candidate. Given that managers are just as unique as candidates, it helps if you learn about your potential hiring manager and the team you’d be joining before an interview. Knowing some traits about the team or the manager can help you tweak your behaviors during the interview. Interviews are ultimately just long conversations between candidates and interviewers. How the conversation goes will greatly impact the overall interview success.
Being able to function as part of a team is vital to any role. Managers are looking for individuals who can do the work, but also be part of a larger cohesive group. Many times, you hear of people being a “hero” where they operate by themselves to “save the day” for a company.
Hero behavior is rarely what a manager is looking for. Managers want the team to succeed, not just the individual. They’re looking for individuals who are OK with sharing the glory of a success.
Being a “team player” is also shown through the way that a candidate handles situations. How does the candidate handle conflict resolution? What does the candidate do if presented with a situation where they need to ask for help?
Responses to questions like these can greatly help or hurt a candidate’s success in an interview. When I’ve done interviews in the past, the way the candidate asks for help greatly speaks to how they would work on my team.
When hiring for a role, I always want to make sure a candidate can “fit” with the team they’re joining. Team dynamics are always unique. A candidate’s behavior and actions should align with what the manager’s team needs.
It helps if, during the interview, a candidate asks about how the team works. Ultimately, how a person will “fit” on a team will determine their success in their role and the company they are interviewing for.
Assessing fit is less about personality and more about how the person approaches and interacts with the work. With any team, having a good working dynamic is just as important as having a good individual contributor.
For example, when issues arise on a project, does the candidate engage the team early on, or attempt to solve it on their own first? Another example: how does the candidate handle a difficult ask of another team? The way individuals operate in these interactions provides good signals for how they will fit on a team.
Managers want candidates who can also accept teaching. Having a “safe space” is important for team cohesion and success.
This can be particularly difficult in high-paced roles where there are heavy deadlines and competitive pressure. Even in a high-stress role, the ability to help the team is still superior to an individual’s “hero” ability.
In software development, in particular, learning is always constant. It’s important for individuals to understand that they can always learn something new and that their method of doing things is not always the best. In short, humility is important.
Circling back to technical skills, it is also OK if a candidate is unable to solve a problem.
For big-tech FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) roles in particular, people tend to focus on being able to quickly and accurately solve software problems. Your ability to demonstrate how you solve problems is just as important as your ability to solve a problem.
I always look for candidates who can think and logically work through problems. No one knows everything or is perfect with all tech stacks. Technologies change frequently, and it’s difficult (if not impossible) to keep up with every trend and best practice.
When I have interviewed candidates, their ability to work through a problem (and ask for help) is just as vital as them actually solving the problem presented. I have specifically passed over candidates who present a specific solution without being able to explain how it works or why that would be a good choice.
Managers also want someone that is persistent. Software engineering requires stamina when faced with problems.
A lot of your time as a software engineer is spent debugging and trying to review a system to fix a system. In an interview, if the candidate gives up easily or quickly shuts down, this is usually not favorable.
I write this and also understand that every personality is different. Some people may get stressed easily, but if given space can perform beautifully. In an interview, it can be difficult to discern stress management as interviews are usually timed and have some level of pressure.
Candidates should demonstrate that they can work with a problem and at least manage when things do not go their way. Different teams have norms for how to handle these situations. As I already stated, it greatly helps if you understand how the team you are interviewing operates.
If you do not have information on the team, it is best to try to be as amenable as possible in stressful interview situations. Showing the manager that you can work with them is just as important as demonstrating that you can solve a problem.
All of the above is still only hitting the “tip of the iceberg” with regards to what managers look for. Every team operates differently, and as such, managers will be looking for unique personality traits and behaviors.
The key takeaway is that a manager is not only interested in your ability to solve problems, but also in your ability to work with them. Managers may hire someone who lacks some technical skills but is a great team player. They might also hire someone just based on how they failed at solving a problem.
The important part for any candidate is demonstrating that they are relatable and could work well in the role which they are interviewing for.
I’ve sat in many interviews throughout my career. Here are the areas I’d recommend focusing your prep on. Note that every company is different; this is just a reflection of my personal experience.
Most interview prep guides point you to start studying data structures and algorithms in preparation for an interview. If you apply for FAANG positions, these will typically come up in the coding exercises that you go through in the initial screening, and the later technical interview portions of the process.
Unfortunately, you will probably spend more time and effort here than you would need for an actual position. What is important to note is having a fundamental understanding versus being able to recite from memory.
As I stated in the earlier section, no one expects you to know all of this perfectly. Having an understanding, however, will enable you to speak to data structures and algorithms when working through the technical questions in the interview. Some companies have very rigorous coding exercises that will require you to pick a specific data structure and algorithm for a solution.
It can be okay if you pick the wrong solution, as long as you are able to communicate why and how it solves the problem.
Specific data structures that will come up often include:
And there are some specific algorithms you should know:
There is a pretty wide range of resources available for practicing data structures and algorithms. Some of these include:
Practicing problems is where people often get stuck. Individuals will spend hours trying to work through LeetCode problems instead of understanding the fundamental reasoning behind a pattern or algorithm.
What I would recommend is understanding where to use what. For example: when would it make sense to use a hash table vs. an array?
Interviewers such as myself usually ask about things like performance and optimizations. It helps to understand BigO notation, but ultimately, it’s most important to understand why picking one approach makes more sense than another.
With regards to practicing above, it also helps to have a specific language you are proficient in. I’ll normally ask candidates to pick a language. If you practice a lot with one, then stick to it.
It also helps to understand a range of languages if that is necessary for a role. However, for entry-level positions especially, having a strong knowledge of a language makes it easier for you to communicate. It helps to pick a language that you know the team or role will use. Language choice and prep all depend on what role you are applying for.
Finally, if you want more resources, I recommend this article on dev.to as it includes additional discussion of ways to prepare for technical questions.
As part of a software engineering interview, you will normally be asked to conduct a system design. This part of the interview typicalls asks you to build out a flow chart or some visual and make architectural decisions for a system.
Depending on the role, this section may be more in-depth. The important part is that you understand how software systems work and the tradeoffs between different choices.
Study system designs for popular applications like Instagram or Twitter (X). YouTube has quite a few coding interview videos that you can easily find. I recommend finding one that is either an example interview or goes through fundamental patterns. I found there are several great ones by exponent available on YouTube like this one.
Key topics that you should understand going into a system design interview include:
As I stated in the earlier sections, your ability to explain yourself and your decisions is much more important than making the best decision. Having a fundamental understanding of system design concepts that you can then apply to a solution is most important.
Even if you pick the wrong solution, if you can defend what you’re doing and demonstrate that to an interviewer, then you are still on your way to success.
There are a multitude of resources on CS fundamentals. When I say “CS fundamentals” here, I just mean the core concepts that are the basis for computer science. These include things like data structures and algorithms, but more broadly include design patterns that software systems follow.
These are also often opinionated, as there are many ways to design the same thing. However, there are fundamental parts of any software system that routinely come up.
CS fundamentals cross over with the data structures and algorithms prep above. Areas that you should focus on include:
YouTube is also a great resource for CS fundamentals. There are a lot of channels that cover basics and walk you through how different things work with common patterns.
CS fundamentals is definitely a very broad area to study. It helps if you can hone in on what is used in the role you are applying for. Does the role deal more with low-level network protocols? What database does the role require knowledge of? All of these can help you cater your prep.
Throughout your career as a software engineer, you will build on your knowledge of CS fundamentals. With more experience, you will gain more knowledge and understanding. As you get more experience, you will pick up more CS fundamentals and be able to use them when creating solutions. Interviewers and hiring managers know that more seasoned roles will require and expect more understanding of CS fundamentals.
Depending on how much preparation you want to undergo for an interview, it also helps to have examples, or at least some experience working with some fundamental things. If you can code out something that manages memory, for example, it may help your understanding of CPU and I/O management by an operating system.
Most interviewers will ask about DevOps. Since each cloud provider has slightly different services, it helps if you know ahead of time which cloud provider they use. There are many common services and patterns across cloud providers that can be leveraged for any DevOps questions.
Just as with the CS fundamentals, what is more important is understanding how the cloud providers work and the patterns that are typically used.
Similarly, interviews for software developer roles in 2025 will undoubtedly include questions about AI. It helps to understand how to use AI tools when building software. It also helps if you can have some experience in leveraging AI for a solution.
Even if you do not have experience with AI, understanding how to use it for a solution or common tasks will be much better than not knowing anything at all.
AI is present in almost everything in technology today. Even when companies do not use it directly for a product, they may use AI tools to work on the same product.
There are several great tools today that can help both in prep and actually writing software. Since you will need to understand concepts for your interview, I recommend using these AI tools as an advisor to understand and solve problems.
I’ve had good experience directly prompting Claude and CoPilot for coding questions. One good method would be to either get the AI to generate some example problems for you to play with, or pull some examples from another source and use the AI to help with questions if you get stuck.
The important note is that you want to understand the concepts and how to solve the problems you are working on. You probably will not have the AI tools available to use during the interview, so you should prepare as such.
I have already spoken a fair amount about how a manager interprets behavioral questions — i.e. questions that assess how you’ve handled situations in the past (to predict your future performance).
Even though there is a “behavioral” section to an interview, any interaction you have with an interviewer will showcase your behavioral working style. As I’ve stated throughout this post, the way you interact with the interviewer is just as important as providing a solid solution.
Referring back to the note on “fit” in the earlier section, the way candidates respond to behavioral questions gives managers insight into how they would behave on the team. It helps if you as a candidate ask for working styles (or you could try to find out beforehand) and try to find behavioral examples that align with your prospective team.
Using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is a good approach to behavioral questions. When practicing for the behavioral section of an interview, it helps to have real examples for common questions. You can even phrase your responses to behavioral questions including the STAR acronym (i.e. “The situation I had was A, the task I had was B, the action I took was C, and the result was D”). Just as I mentioned in the other sections, using YouTube is great for behavioral interview questions.
Typically, in a behavioral interview, you will get asked things like:
Many times in a behavioral interview, there will also be company-specific questions. It helps to do your research ahead of time to understand things about the role and company you are applying for.
Even with the company-specific questions, using the STAR method and practice always helps you to work towards success. It’s always a great sign of success when a candidate shows they have done their homework ahead of an interview.
As I stated earlier, software engineering interviews are one of the most difficult things to prepare for in the job market today. Technology changes rapidly, and any software engineering role will be unique to a company’s needs and culture.
The most important thing is to show that you can communicate and are able to work through problems in a manner that fits the company you are applying to.
The job market today is highly competitive due to several different economic factors and a large pool of talent. Even seasoned engineers find themselves having to continually train to “keep their tools sharp” to be good at what they do.
A fundamental part of all of the prep for a software development position is practice and experience. Of course, if you are applying for an entry-level role, your experience won’t be as robust.
However, having a fundamental understanding of concepts and the various topics covered in this post will enable you to speak the language that the interviewer is looking for. You will find more success if you can demonstrate that you can work through problems and work in ways that align with the company and role that you are applying for.
Every company is unique, and you should definitely tailor your preparation to whatever company and role you are applying for. That being said, the common themes and topics presented in this post will help guide anyone when prepping for a software engineering interview.
I also recommend talking to other engineers and people who work in the industry you are applying for. Through all of this preparation, you will be able to better prepare yourself for the interview process. Thanks for reading my post!
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