Final Developer Interview Rounds: Assessing Team Fit

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all right folks I'm jumping over to YouTube for a question and this is from everything has a handle now and the question is about um looks like interview coming up so I'm currently in the second and final round of an interview for a 2-year traineeship so sounds pretty cool the selection will be based on 15minute interview rounds with five internal teams okay each team can choose who they want to have so the teams will conduct these interviews for about 3 hours so I was wondering if you were in the position of these team leaders what would you look for considering the short time my current plan is just be myself and hope for the best and then they said some extra information might not be needed but I think extra information is always helpful if you're looking for more specific answers I feel like it

doesn't hurt so extra info is that uh eight spots will create a kind of trainy team okay so that's interesting right so that actually is helpful um consisting of two software Engineers I'm going for this two test Engineers two two embedded and two extra 30 candidates left okay sorry I was like how does that math work but it's there's 30 candidates to go through um and I know because I have the numbers in front of me if it wasn't obvious they're going for a software engineering position and there's two slots now when he says 30 candidates left or he or she sorry um I don't know if that's 30 software engineering candidates I don't know if that's people going through these other roles um but what's interesting is that it is there there are eight slots and I do see test Engineers I do see

embedded I don't know what the difference is between embedded like is it embedded software Engineers because maybe that's still of interest I'm making an assumption here they're not totally interested in the test engineer role and two extra I don't I don't know what that means maybe it's like TBD like it could be any of the above so the way I read this is there's a team of eight so there's eight positions in total and arguably up to six of those could be some type of software developer position and two are more test but minimally because I I don't know from the details minimally two are going to be software engineering so um interesting I think this is a a cool one to talk through so I'll give my perspective obviously when I go to answer this I think this person knows like I am not

the person in charge of that so this is going to be purely my perspective um and I should mention before I jump into this um if you have questions you want to answer leave in the comments happy to try my best if you want to be anonymous and you want to write a lot more detail feel free to message me uh Dev leader is the uh personal brand I use on all social media platforms and that is my main YouTube channel if you want to check that out for more edited succinct videos and not just me rambling at a camera usually driving around in a car so okay I think it's going to be hard in a 15minute interview for them to I'm trying to think of like traditional interviews that I go into where you're going to have like coding questions system design behavioral

interviews I don't know I'm assuming they've already kind of done this kind of stuff and because they're saying I'm currently in the second and final round of an interview so I'm assuming they've already done some of the technical stuff and that's that assumption is going to frame up the rest of my sort of positioning around this and just to clarify that I would believe that's done because in 15 minutes I don't think that that's um something that anyone is going to be able to gauge effectively so I think this is going to be mostly about behavioral interviews um and with that said my perspective is going to be that like as they kind of said considering the short time my current plan is just to be myself and hope for the best so I don't think you necessarily need to hope for the best I

think you should hope um but I think you I think your strategy is actually interesting here so um when we talk about behavioral interviews like the one of the key things that I I try to make sure that people understand is that behavioral interview questions are like there's a goal in mind when you're being asked questions so I suspect you'll have more more behavioral interview style questions in this I also do think that on top of just what I might classify like a be as a behavioral interview question you will probably have stuff that it's like people just want to see kind of like where your interests align um I have another thought that I want to add on to this about the 30 candidates left in eight people so I'm saying this out loud so I can try to remember it as I keep

labbing away here but yeah I think this will primarily be focused on a couple things behavioral interview questions there's not much time to get through a lot here um sort of like a team fit which is slightly it's still related to behavioral interview but like for example if they're gauging kind of maybe your interests and some of your strengths in in particular um some teams might say like hey we really want this person so let's assume just to park it for a moment let's assume that on the technical side like anyone who's made it to this round has demonstrated their technical skills okay whether that's coding system design whatever it is right they've demonstrated the technical skills that's why people were able to move on now I think what's happening if I'm putting myself in the perspective of what I believe is going on here

and if I'm on the recruiting side of this it's hey we have 30 candidates that we thought are pretty good technically let's figure out where they best fit and because we have 30 and there's eight slots um then we can we can try to align that I'm trying to see if I'm missing anything though selection will be based on 15-minute interview rounds with five internal teams each team okay and let me let me double check this extra info okay if there each te this is the one thing that I don't know the detail of so I'll try to cover both sides of this but hear me out I don't know if each team there's 30 candidates and if there's five teams of eight that's like that's 40 positions it would mean automatically that people are all hired and they have open rooms I don't think

that's the case but if there's five teams it's kind of weird um I don't know how many people per team like the math doesn't really math so the the reason I'm saying this is like I don't know if they're looking at they couldn't be Staffing these entire teams with like trainees I guess so maybe I'm kind of uh I'm trying to I'm over complicating this but um what the reason I was bringing that up is I was thinking perhaps the way that they're approaching this is that they have they're the teams are trying to figure out based on people's interest where they they're going to align and I think that is happening but you know if there's two software Engineers two test Engineers two embedded and two extra I don't know how like is it one team that's going to have have the test the

two test Engineers like I I don't know the the split of how that's going to look that's what's going through my head right now and why I'm kind of struggling for some advice on on the behavioral or sorry the the part addition to the behavioral interview question so behavioral interview questions probably something like a team fit that's the part where I'm like how's that going to look and then on top of that um is this other part that's like like you know be yourself kind of thing because I think this is a good opportunity for people to to kind of gauge like do we want to work with this person and that has a lot of bias with it which is unfortunate but I think it's a it's a thing that's kind of hard to to not acknowledge and I say that because if people

are interviewing you and they they just feel like it's going to be difficult to work with you from whatever they're picking up from the conversation it will just automatically bias them towards other people that aren't making them feel that way so I think when this person is saying my current plan is just be myself one of the reasons why I was saying I actually like that is that if you're trying so hard to present yourself in a different way like it it starts to feel unnatural and then people kind of pick up on that and they're like I don't know but if someone's a lot more like comfortable natural and how they're doing going through the interview that probably feels better in this type of situ situation again if they're parking that everyone has passed the technical bar that's why I'm focused on these three

things so just to kind of rehash them behavioral interview questions probably something like a team fit that's going to say like based on your skills and interests like where you know where's a good fit here I assume that also kind of lines up with like the roll fit that they'll have available and the third part probably what seems like a smaller piece but I don't want it to go ignored is sort of like you being yourself like are you going to be someone that people are they're feeling like yeah I could work with this person okay so just to wrap up that that third point I definitely would encourage you as much as possible to try going into this relaxed I think you're in a great position if you've proven your technical skills which is my assumption right now so congrats on that that's awesome

it's good to be in this second final round um now I think it's about kind of nailing these other two parts um the let's start with the the team fit because I again I'm trying to think about this of myself being on the other end when it comes to like a a team fit in terms of your interest like I hope like I would hope at this point you understand what those teams are I'm not sure maybe they haven't told you but I would hope that that's something that's happened so if you have the opportunity maybe do a little bit of digging into like what these teams are going going to be working on maybe you don't know the like specific details because maybe it's internal or whatever but maybe there's a team that's like hey we build internal tools and there's a team that's

like Hey we're building the front end of stuff and there's another team because I see embedded they're like we have some Hardware product um you know like think about those areas and then try to think about your strengths and interests and how they line up with those areas because I think ideally you want to try maximizing I my guess and and this is an assumption my guess is that you would hope like you would be happy to take any of these but you probably have a preference so what I would not do is try to say like hm like I only want to go for the software engineering role and there's only two out of eight positions so if I get the feeling this one team over here only has a testing role like I wouldn't sabotage that I wouldn't be like I don't really

like testing I'm not really interested in that I would try to think about what each of these teams is doing and try to think about how your strengths tie into that now I understand that if you have a preference like you really want that to shine but I wouldn't try to make something stand out as exceptional by making the rest of the stuff not look good or like not interested in tester I'm not interested in embedded right so I say that because I'm just making the Assumption you want to maximize your opportunity as much as possible so let's think about this right if you if you were able to impress there's five teams you impressed three of them there's going to be three people trying to compete to have you there and I think that's a position you would much rather be in personally I

think um than like okay like you kind of sabotage the testing one you sabotage the embedded one and only one out of the five teams was like kind of interested in you but now they're interested in you but they're also interested in like 10 other candidates out of the 30 so like I just think you want to maximize the surface area for Success there um because I don't know maybe they're making the final decisions at that or maybe they want to they'll follow up with you and kind of give you an option between a couple teams like hey two of the of these five teams were interested like do you have a first pick I don't know that might be Overkill maybe they'll decide um what I'm trying to do is think about um the only thing that I have recently to recently five years

ago um to kind of compare this to that's real where I was on the other end like going through uh sort of an interview process I actually had this with Amazon so when I was interviewing for Microsoft Amazon Google my Amazon interviews I had three offers and basically and I'm as an engineering manager my interviews are different but I had five rounds rounds I four or five interview rounds maybe it was only four at Amazon and then they presented me with they said three teams want to offer to you so then I did follow-up interviews that sound very much like this it wasn't 15 minutes it was longer but I met with um the engineering managers of the team to go talk about like my interests now the difference is that I had three offers and this conversation that I was having with them was

much more of a team fit but they were trying to sell me on it so what I'm thinking about is how would this be reversed you're trying to sell that team on why you're a good fit there and I like I said I think you want to try and maximize um you know the likelihood so think about your skills think about your interest and think about what that team is likely looking for I don't know how much data you have on that but hopefully um given the time frame that you have here trying to see if you actually said uh I don't see I don't see when the interviews are so I hopefully I'm responding to this um in time where you can you can leverage some of this information um but yeah my my thing would be like try to think about what these

teams are going to be working on so that you can align yourself to that now I'll spend the last little bit talking about behavioral interview questions because I still think think you're going to get some of this and even the team fit part I would try to channel some behavioral interview stuff into this so if you're getting asked behavioral interview questions these are often things hey like tell me about a time when you were you know working on a project and something right or you're working with a teammate and something so they'll give you a brief scenario usually it's not like super complicated but it might be something that feels tricky to answer sometimes these feel like they're a trap sometimes sometimes interviewers will do that and you like tell me about a time where you had to resolve a conflict with a peer and

you're like oh man like this is a trap like you know cuz you got to be careful about how you're talking about your peer because obviously there was a conflict you don't want to say they were a crappy person so sometimes it feels like a trap but the the idea with these questions is number one if they're asking about a scenario you don't need like you have 15 minutes in this case if you're getting a behavioral interview question you don't need to go into the weeds of like all the technology and stuff you were using and talking about like these details about a product or service that like that's just really not the relevant point in a behavioral interview question they are trying to understand your behavior right um kind of obvious when you stop and think about it so the idea is like just

enough context in terms of the technology or the the technical situation because that's not really the goal the goal is you have to think about what the interviewer is trying to ask you right so tell me about a project that you were working on where you took the lead on it right and you demonstrated leadership on it so what they don't want to hear is all of the details about the tech stack and like how you know specifically this product like that's not the important part it could be the thing is it could be any product could be any technology that that's sort of irrelevant to the question they're just trying to say give me a scenario right tell me about an experience you had and this is the thing that I want you to talk about right I want you to talk about leadership

so how did you take the lead what does that look like to you like what characteristics are you thinking about when it comes to leadership right how did you take ownership of something how did you take accountability how did you try to drive progress how did you you know try to make sure people were rallying behind a common thing like what did that look like on the project for you because if you're saying yeah I took leadership on this project and and then your answer starts to be like and we used uh C because you know we're a c a c shop we really like using C it's performant and uh you know we're familiar with a lot of the packages and stuff so then we wanted to make sure that we were using asp.net core for that and then our backend was in postgress

and then like they just it's not relevant it just isn't unless they start to change change the behavioral interview question to ask you about technology choices and stuff like that but if they're not asking about it like I would not spend time on it because you don't got much of it um so a bit of a tip there is like to think about if you're going down that rabbit hole of like I know I'm going to talk about technology like just steer away unless they're asking specifically about technology um and the reason just to to W that part up I think a couple things here I think as software developers we love talking about technology and that's what we do so I understand why people want to and the other thing I think is that sometimes people when they don't understand why people are asking

behavioral interview questions they're saying oh I'm thinking like about my resume like what are all the things I can call out technology wise that are really going to make me stand out like they got your resume already they know the stuff that's on there they're trying to hear about these experiences so just try to keep that in mind because I think that gets missed too easily so my my suggestion here is like I would and I've kind of offered this advice before in different videos but I would try to um if you can make some time to go practice this kind of stuff you can go look up example behavioral interview questions you could literally go ask chat GPT or whatever llm you want like give me 50 examples of behavioral interview questions that focus on different characteristics of and you you give it some

context whatever you could say um you know uh I know well actually I don't know I don't know where you're interviewing for I'm assuming it's on Amazon but one one example is like Amazon has leadership um what do they call them like their leadership principles or something it's a big list of them you could if you were interviewing at Amazon you could say give me behavioral interview questions based on these give me 50 of them then so you get your list how ever you'd like to whether that's just researching online using AI to generate them and have it focused on different characteristics and experiences okay now you have your list and what I recommend you do is try making sure number one you understand for each of those questions what is being asked of me I know it sounds like it's a trivial thing but

that's why I was saying I think sometimes people actually miss this try to make sure you understand what is the interviewer trying to understand from this question when they ask me it so get that out of the way and then the second part is try to see if you have different experiences that are highlights or challenges like sort of like memorable experiences in your career or or School working on projects whatever your experience is and try to see if you can have some scenarios that you can talk through for each of them ideally you have multiple scenarios you can refer to I know I said 50 questions you might be like Nick how am I going to come up with like you know 50 to 100 different things here I understand I'm not I'm just kind of throwing some numbers out there but if you

can have multiple scenarios that you could walk through per per question or at least for a couple of them the reason I like that is because if you're like me I blank out on stuff and the worst would be like I'm the kind of person that when I start blanking on something and I realize I'm screwing up like it gets worse like a kind of spiral and funny just a bit of a tangent because I'm really good at tangents one of the things that's helping with that is like these videos so when I live stream on my main Channel when I make these videos I don't edit these videos like if I mess up and I screw up my words or I have to wipe my face because it's itchy if I'm making a normal YouTube video on my main Channel I'm like oh it's

like man that sucks like I have have to pay more for editing because it's just extra time but when I do this kind of stuff it just reminds me like doesn't matter like at all right and when I live stream it's like I might mess up my words or I've had live streams where like my my monitor stopped working and I had to go use this monitor that's behind here and do the whole thing off centered it was a felt like a disaster and people are like we just don't care like it doesn't actually matter so that's something I'm using to work on this situation where like in an interview before I'm like oh I can't remember this really good scenario I know I have it it's like when you can think about a word that's on the tip of your tongue and it doesn't

come out um I'm getting I'm practicing in different ways to to make this better so I can be more comfortable but if you're like me I would try to have a couple scenarios that way if you're like blanking on one you have a backup that you can use and go through these right so practice going through your questions practice your scenarios you might get a question where you're like oh man like I I know I had 50 questions in my practice and like I didn't see this one coming but the reality is you probably walk through a bunch of scenarios in your practice and maybe there's something that stands out from one of those experiences you have where you could go relate it I know when I was interviewing for big Tech and practicing this stuff um I felt pretty lucky that uh I think

feel like as an engineering manager I had a lot of different experiences I could draw on like I I had to focus less specifically on technology and more about experiences and that was something that worked in my favor because when someone was like tell me about a time when you had to resolve a conflict I'm like I have like 15 different experiences in the last month I could go tell you about um but I still practice them I just had to spend less time practicing which is really nice so I think for a lot of software Engineers it's less common that you you know uh that these things come to mind very fast so definitely practice so behavioral interview questions that's what we just talked about team fit kind of stuff so how you're going to talk about your strengths your interest and how that

aligns specifically to what you believe that team is going to be working on and the last part which we talked about right at the start was try to be yourself relax right you don't want to seem uh like you're not authentic I know sometimes it's really challenging because interviewing is a skill but I don't know if you can hear my cat meowing but it's outrageous right now so I'm going to wrap up the video and uh yeah I hope that's helpful and I wish you the best of success in your interview round you're almost there wishing you luck and uh yeah if you end up watching this and it was helpful and you get your your job position let us know um thanks and I'll see you next time