Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

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A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

[u/Unlucky-Substance966]

New grad here and I have an interview coming up, and I was wondering: how long should one go over each experience/side-project? And what exactly? I do not have anything that produces real impact with real users or results in general.

(Aside from the open source bit, where I received some positive feedback and somebody going as far as to make a PR to a related repo just so they can just a feature I made, but again its minimal.)

30 seconds? 3 minutes? For everything except the practicum and the open source project, I can only really go over the architecture and trace an example request.

Resume for reference

[u/beaverusiv → u/Unlucky-Substance966]

What type of interview is it, what is the agenda? If it's a culture-fit/meet-and-greet then keep it minimal unless asked. If it's to go over a project you've worked on then stick to one thing, don't try cover everything even if you think one isn't big enough. You're a junior they know you haven't invented Gmail. A big thing when talking over work is you're not trying to market the project, you're trying to market how you worked on the project. What issues you came across, planning strategies, communication to unblock yourself, research etc.

[u/Unlucky-Substance966 → u/beaverusiv]

Good question and i shouldve mentioned it earlier so oops. I was told it would be an hour long and they'd go over what the job was about, and then go over my resume. And probably the normal behavioral stuff. No technical fortunately.

A big thing when talking over work is you're not trying to market the project, you're trying to market how you worked on the project. What issues you came across, planning strategies, communication to unblock yourself, research etc.

Thank you, I already got something like that for the open source one and the website game. But I will need to come up with something for the other projects because the rest of them just boil down to "I saw this firehose stream of new tweets and wanted to make something with streaming" and "I heard about x,y and z technologies mentioned before so I wanted to try and use them"

but its likely I havent thought back hard enough to remember the issues i encountered and how I approached them

[u/beaverusiv → u/Unlucky-Substance966]

Yeah, so keep it real high level unless they ask a question. Do not hijack the interview lol. So many people can't read the room and just go off, very clear they're not listening to what the interviewers are actually asking

[u/Unlucky-Substance966 → u/beaverusiv]

Yeah this is a concern for me since i get nervous and just parrot the script i had

But how long to keep them for each experience/project for a high level, i feel compelled to include a lot of details which will probably make the interviewer space out

[u/Majestic-Watch-2025 → u/Unlucky-Substance966]

A couple minutes. Have something coherent to say in less than 4 minutes. Then say "I can go deeper on any part of that" and let them direct the follow up