HACKER Q&A
📣 Karsteski

Entry level Software Engineer phone interview, how best to prepare?


As the title says, I have a phone interview tomorrow. I'm working on switching careers from being a chemist to software development, so I'm even more stressed as I feel like I still have so much more to learn. The company is in NY, and I'm in Canada, but its remote so that's cool.

Regardless, right now I've been going over fundamentals (Python, SQL, JS and C++ are focuses of this company) and reviewing what I did for my GitHub projects, why I made certain design decisions and how I could improve them. I've been practicing some leetcode as well, especially since I failed my last technical interview a few weeks ago, and I know I need to improve on the data structure/algorithm questions that companies ask.

Is there anything I'm missing in terms of preparation? Any advice welcome, thanks in advance :)

  👤 softwaredoug Accepted Answer ✓
Is this a screening call where you are grilled with tech questions? Or is this an initial chat where both sides share what they’re looking for in a candidate/you say what you want in a position?
👤 matt_s
From other comments it sounds like its an initial call.

Something to think about is how your background in being a chemist can relate to software. Do you see similarities with how things are structured chemically and how you build programs? Are there analysis and debugging skills that can help you as a programmer? I'll also assume there is a fair amount of statistics used in the sciences which is helpful when working with applications that have decent traffic.

Good Luck!