Interviewing is a stressful process regardless of position or industry. Most interview processes follow a similar pattern. You talk to an HR professional as an initial screening. Then you may speak with a hiring manager, the position’s direct manager, and maybe an executive, and you are done. Software engineering interview processes are similar but differ by including technical assessments.
Besides behavioral and team fit evaluations, you may also have technical and skill-based assessments. Two technical sections of the software engineering interview process are technical screens and technical interviews. While they sound similar, they focus on very different skills and experiences. What are the differences between a technical interview and a technical screen?
The Full Software Engineering Interview Process
Before we dive into the differences between a technical screen and a technical interview, let us walk through a complete interview process. The general software engineering interview process consists of the following components:
• Introductory phone screen with an HR or technical recruiter
• Technical screen with an engineering manager, another engineer, or a technical recruiter
• One or more rounds of technical interviews with engineers or engineering and product managers
• Optional final company fit interviews with managers or directors (depending on the size of the company)
The parts of this process that stand out from other interview processes are the technical screen and technical interview. These components are specific to software engineering and are a way for a company to assess a candidate’s technical fit instead of just their behavioral fit or relevant experiences. Let’s talk about what these interview parts consist of.
What is a Technical Screen?
A technical screen is a behavioral interview with an emphasis on technical experiences. Typical behavioral interviews focus on items like time management and conflict resolution. Technical screens include how you work with software development-based events and situations.
In typical behavioral interviews, you may get a question like “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a colleague and how you resolved it.” A technical screen would modify this to be “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a colleague on an approach for a new software feature and how you resolved your disagreement.” The questions focus more on software tasks, narrowing the experiences you may pull from to form your answer.
Technical screens are used to assess a software engineer’s soft skills. The delivery of your responses matters almost as much as the content of what you talk about. Understanding a question from a recruiter and giving a clear, concise answer sets you apart from other interviewees that may ramble or not answer the question.
Many blog posts, including this one from Indeed, offer a list of the most asked technical screen interview questions. While the questions don’t vary much between interviewers, you may want to modify your responses based on the company culture and job description. If a company values open discussion and confrontation for early solutions, you may answer the conflict resolution question differently. It pays to research a company to ensure your answers fit a company’s culture.
Practice makes perfect with technical screen responses. Make sure you can provide concise answers to any of the common questions then you will ace this interview portion!
What is a Technical Interview?
This blog post from Career Karma states that technical interviews fall into one of three categories: technical, behavioral, or design based. The behavior-based technical interview falls into the category of the technical screen, and the technical and design-based categories correspond to a technical interview.
Technical interviews refer to interviews that test the hard skills or technical abilities required to perform a job. They can take many forms, but the most common types are:
• Whiteboard interviews
• Timed technical assessments
• Take home technical exams
• Pairing technical interviews
• Feature and app-based designed interviews
Whiteboard interviews are the most familiar technical interviews for software engineers. In this interview format, an interviewee is given a dry-erase marker and a whiteboard and asked to draw and write code to solve a programming problem. This can take the form of functional code or pseudocode but is an opportunity for interviewees to prove they can understand and solve problems with arbitrary constraints.
This interview can take many forms beyond an in-person whiteboard. To perform this online, interviewees may share their screen to solve problems in an online integrated development environment (IDE) or even write code in Google Sheets! Beyond getting a correct solution, this type of interview allows interviewers to get a feel for a prospective employee’s ability to code, explain their thought processes, and communicate.
A less social form is timed technical assessments and take-home technical exams. Both technical exams include an interviewee getting a set of technical questions to solve. They differ in the time constraints imposed on solving the questions.
Timed technical exams may be stressful as the interviewee is usually given 30 minutes to 2 hours to solve several data structure and algorithm questions. They may also receive bugs to fix or features to build within an existing app. Interviewees are judged on the correctness and speed by which they complete the exams, but not on their soft skills.
Take-home technical exams may be less stressful. They can consist of several data structures and algorithms questions or an app or feature to build. Usually, these are more time-intensive, requiring many hours of work to complete before turning them in for grading.
These questions are closer to actual work and can be a better way to evaluate candidates. A hybrid approach for the previous technical interviews is pairing interviews. In this interview, you will work with one or more other software engineers to write code to solve a problem or feature. This format displays your teamwork and communication while also exhibiting your technical abilities to code.
The final common type of technical interview is the feature or app-based design interview. These interviews focus on understanding design constraints rather than actually writing code. You may be asked how to construct a front end to allow the reuse of components and layouts or the best way to set up a database to allow for ambiguous associations. This focuses more on the architecture of apps rather than the simple implementation of code.
Technical screens are easier to prepare as you can match your responses to company culture and job postings. Technical interviews take more work to prepare for. The broad range of interview types combined with the endless questions makes it hard to ensure success. Websites like LeetCode and HackerRank allow you to practice data structure and algorithm questions and get as prepared as possible.
How to Best Prepare for Your Interviews
Being prepared for a software engineering interview isn’t something you can do the day before your interview. The questions for a technical interview will test and stress your ability to understand data structures and manipulate them efficiently with existing and novel algorithms. You must consistently practice and rework your stories about projects and skills for your technical screen. Both of these require extensive preparation.
Self-study will help, but if you are serious about getting structure and support to ace your interviews, you may want to attend a software engineering bootcamp. Thinkful offers a great 5-month Software Engineering Bootcamp with a curriculum offering opportunities for theoretical learning and practical applications. Thinkful is an excellent option if you are interested in a program supporting data structure and algorithm prep and design and behavior-based mock interviews!
Self-study will help, but if you are serious about getting structure and support to ace your interviews, you may want to attend a software engineering bootcamp. Thinkful offers a great 5-month Software Engineering Bootcamp with a curriculum offering opportunities for theoretical learning and practical applications. Thinkful is an excellent option if you are interested in a program supporting data structure and algorithm prep and design and behavior-based mock interviews!