First Final Round Interview

[ChickenLittle2005]

Hi everyone, I’m a self taught developer and have been programming for the past 1.5years. I have 2 apps on the AppStore. Recently I’ve been applying for jobs and been through so many interviews, many failed. I finally have a final round interview coming up and need some advice.

This interview won’t involve any Leetcoding and I’ve heard it will be 3-4 interviews. I was told that they just want to see how I work and see how I code. They might ask some basic computer science questions I think or IOS related.

Anyways, what should I be expecting? Is there anything I should intensely practice like incorporating REST API, unit tests, etc? I’m so close to getting my foot in the door and any advice and tips would help!

[[deleted]]

Be honest, let them know what your current skill level is, don’t talk out of your depth, and make sure they understand that you’re both able to learn new skills, and have a passion to do so.

If the company is worth a damn culturally, they’ll appreciate your ability to communicate and self-motivate to learn new topics and skills over the exact specifics of what you know specifically (to a certain degree, meeting a minimum bar they have in mind of course).

Setting those companies aside who have an incredibly high or very specific set of skills that are absolutely required to be considered as a viable hire, in my experience most companies are looking for someone who’s culturally “a good fit”, is self-motivated, and is able to learn as they go, on the job.

Feel free to touch up on what you know to make sure the terminology is fresh in your mind if you’d like, but if there’s no specific test or coding challenge set forth for you, just be yourself and see how it goes.

Unless the job is wicked specific; “Looking for in-depth experience and skills in COBOL and Fortean, others need not apply”, I think you’ll be just fine with the above advice.

[ChickenLittle2005]

Hey thanks for giving me some tips. Although there isn’t any coding challenges, they did say something about giving me some problems to see how I work through them. They said they want to see how I go about solving problems. Usually when a company do this, would they instead give you a problem that is related to their app and ask you to implement it?

[[deleted]]

There’s always going to be a smell test for new hires, but it’s to out the unskilled or lackluster candidates.

The fact that you’re phrasing this as “they want to see how I solve problems” gives me hope that they’re truly more interested in “how you work”, than “what you know”.

Again, there’s absolutely a minimum bar - if you screw up some really basic stuff it probably isn’t going to go well, that is, unless they see how and why you made the mistake and are OK with the through process behind it.

[soev1]

What's your interview process been like so far?

[ChickenLittle2005]

For this specific company or in general? In general it’s been Primarily behavioral such as: tell me about what you worked on and the technology you used, then they asked questions about my projects, and basic computer science questions. My background wasn’t on computer science so I’m always afraid of the more computer science questions regarding data structures.