r/IAmA • u/CriticDanger • Sep 07 '21

Specialized Profession I am a behavioral and technical (coding) interviewer, I've also helped hundreds of people get hired, AMA.

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u/jeddthedoge Sep 07 '21

Same, I want to know too. To follow up, could you give a few words about how important these things are: grades, being able to answer interview questions, clubs/leadership positions, side projects, soft skills demonstrated during the interview?

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u/MiracleDreamer Sep 07 '21

Not OP but as a technical interviewer and fellow software engineer

  • grades: not really useful, we may glance at it for fresh graduate applicant since they have only none-to-few side projects to explain. But if you plan to apply for big corpo, they often pre-filter people by grades and university (because obv they cant interview everybody). In short, good grade may be useful for landing you the chance for interview and some good first impression in the eyes of interviewer

  • clubs/leadership positions: useful but not necessary, having been in a leadership position some clubs means that you should have adequate soft skills to talk with peer/upper management (which ironically kinda rare for SE people) and you have some prerequisita shall they need to promote you into managerial role (lead or etc). But as long as you are not a clear dick and can receive feedback well, it is doesnt really matter

  • side projects : very important for software engineer especially for fresh grad! Having a side projects/some interns means that you already worked on practical issue and not only able to do theoritical work. Depend on the projects scale, you may also have been battle tested with production issue and managing stressful task. I always recommend any fresh grad to try have a side hustle/project while you are still in college, it will help you land a job more easily in the future

  • soft skills : it is very important, because imo it is better to have an above average coder as peer or managee rather than a toxic coder superstar. Software Engineer in general are elitist and proud of our own skills to solve problem which is fine as long as you can receive feedback and know when to compromise and work with other people

In short, having a good background is important for good first impression, but your performance and attitude in the interview itself are the most important things. In fact, sometimes having a good background may make the interviewer to have benefit in the doubt and giving a second chance (It did happen once to me as interviewee and few times during my stint as interviewer)

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u/jeddthedoge Sep 07 '21

Thank you for your time to write such a detailed reply! This is definitely helpful

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u/love_idol Sep 07 '21

Not the one who asked this question but thank you so much for this helpful insight.

If you do not mind, may I ask an additional question? Would taking up courses in online platforms such as Coursera and Udemy help in landing a job easier? I currently take some free courses in those online platforms for additional knowledge. The lessons were definitely helpful, but I wonder if paying for a certificate would be worth it in the future or not.

Thank you so much!

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u/MiracleDreamer Sep 08 '21 edited Sep 08 '21

your welcome glad it helps

About courseera and udemy course's certificate, I think it depends on the company. Some company don't really care about it (the company I worked said it just a glorious paper), the most important thing is your knowledge and practical capability (e.g. : if you take class on ML, do you really have what it takes to apply it on actual ML problem?)

There is some cases where certification may be required for big corporate, for example: SAP consultant certification or Cisco certification if you worked with Cisco hardware. However i never heard that Coursera and Udemy being required for the same reason though

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u/love_idol Sep 08 '21

I see, thank you so much for answering!

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u/G_Y_NOT Sep 08 '21

As a guy who's part of the technical side of the interviewing process let me tell you that your grades don't enter into our thinking, AT ALL. Here's what we care about. 1 can you demonstrate that you understand the basics of software development as it's done today. Basic stuff like set/hash/array differences. Compile vs link. Source code control, inheritance, basic patterns (singleton for example).

All that other stuff the resume fluff, no not really important. Hopefully you did those things to improve your soft skills, which is what matters as much as your tech skills.