A Crucial Tip for Answering Interview Questions Effectively.
From an Engineer who is currently interviewing.
In my last post, 8 Important Cultural Fit Interview Questions for Software Engineers, I created a checklist of cultural interview questions that you might encounter in your journey interviewing for a software development position along with my own personal answers to each question. While I believe that the answers I gave were true to who I am, they could be more effective at getting me a job. There’s nothing wrong with being personable but a good piece of advice I received recently is you don’t want to give away too much. This leads me to the point of this blog.
Objective vs. Subjective Answering
Often times in preparation for an interview, I find myself writing checklists to make sure I’m ready for the experience. It’s been a little over two weeks since my last post and in that time I’ve had 3 interviews. I’ve also used this time to consult with my career coach and other employed engineers I’ve met on LinkedIn to ask them for advice or hear any insight they have to give. I’ve come to the realization that a great method for answering interview questions is to approach answering a question from an objective standpoint rather than subjective. What do I mean by this? First, let’s look at the definitions of subjective and objective.
Subjective:
Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.
Objective:
(of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.
To elaborate on what I mean by answering questions objectively over subjectively, I wanted to use a question and answer from my previous blog to really show the difference in the quality of answers.
Why do you want to be a Software Engineer?
My previous answer from 2 weeks ago: “I’ve always wanted to contribute to society but I never felt like I had anything to give. I felt like I possessed the vision to help the world but I didn’t have the ability to produce anything tangible. When I studied at the Flatiron School, I was trained in Ruby/React and by the time I graduated from the program, I had a very good understanding of it. I was able to create many different dynamic applications that offered some sort of solution or solved a problem. I finally felt like I acquired the ability to help people in a meaningful way and that experience made me feel more motivated. I felt like King Arthur pulled Excalibur out of the stone.”
First, I just want to stress that I don't regret this answer. I think anyone who has ever met me would tell you that I definitely wear my heart on my sleeve (I mean, I do play for an emo band after all). That being said, I feel I relied too heavily on trying to sound like the perfect candidate as opposed to using the opportunity to “talk tech” and prove why I should be considered for this position. I believe that the best answer is a healthy combination of both.
My revised answer: “I was born in ’93 and grew up around computers. I taught myself how to use one very young so interacting and evolving along with computers allowed me to witness their importance at the start of the new millennium. The following decade we saw the commercial use of the internet skyrocket and small start-up companies became major industry players like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. While I’ve always admired people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg for their ambition, I never had the confidence that I possessed the intellectual acuity to learn software development. Until I asked myself “Why not me?” and I couldn’t come up with a good enough answer. Ironically as a Software Engineering graduate, I often find myself visiting websites like Facebook or Amazon and thinking “I could build something this” and then immediately dropping into their source code to see what they do to build these wildly successful platforms. Then I take what I learn and apply it to my own projects whether it be implementing a navbar, styling for a profile avatar, or using a google map across an application.”
To me, the quality of my answers are like night and day and they accomplish communicating the same things. Challenge yourself to look at answering questions with more of an emphasis on objectivity and I believe that you will elevate your chances of employment. This is a lifelong challenge and you will only get better at it the more you do it! I hope this article was useful for you.
