Top Technical questions asked in an interview for the role of Software Engineer.

IndyWise
3 min readOct 29, 2020

Software engineering is a field that came into existence in 1960 but became known for all after the conference of 1968. Nowadays it is in so much need and so much popular amongst not only engineering aspirants but also to the fields and companies where they are somehow trying to enter into a bit more technical ground and software engineers are the people who occupy 48 percent of people who recently learned new skills compared to 36 percent among all professionals.

When everything is technology-based, everyone needs a bunch of good and great software engineers with them for technical work and assistance, hence they recruit from places to places, campus, and many more ways of recruitment. The question comes when the job aspirant sits into an interview. This is an interview to not only know about you but to choose the most suitable candidate for their technical upliftment, so they are going to come up with some easy, moderate, and tough questions as well. Although we cannot read the minds of recruiters, we can at least prepare ourselves for a particular company, their technical backgrounds, and most importantly about some frequently asked questions in an interview.

The two parts, i.e., to know about the company and their technical backgrounds will be a dependent question. To come up with the general questions or common approach to them, it is very important to know that Software Engineering jobs tend to fall under two categories, i.e., Domain-specific or General Programming.

If you are interviewing for a domain-specific role, expect the questions to be centralized around the specific or particular technology or specific language, like JavaScript, C programming or React. These interviews may also involve some take-home test that requires you to debug or build something out of the matter given.

For general programming roles, the basic format comes from the problem-solving ability, your coding proficiency. So you are going to face questions that not only shows your technical know-how but also the behavior factor.

So, few general and technical questions that are asked from a software engineer are:

  • What is computer software? (to check the basic knowledge)
  • What is software engineering? (To check what you know about the field)
  • What programming language do you use the most?
  • What is SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle)? What are its models? What are the various phases of it?
  • What is the software scope?
  • What is the project presentation?
  • How can we derive the size of software products?
  • What is Software Configuration Management?
  • What is the Software Requirement Specification?
  • What is the software metric?
  • What is modularization?
  • What is cohesion?

Talking about the Advanced technical questions, you can face are:

  • Describe the process of writing code.
  • How can you make sure that your code can handle different kinds of error questions?
  • What is responsive design? What is the difference between fixed and fluid layouts?

You can also go through some algorithm and data Structure Questions, like:

  • What is a stack and what are the three basic operations of a stack?
  • How does the array differ from the stack?
  • Implement a linear search in JavaScript.
  • What are some of the building blocks of HTML?
  • How do you organize CSS files?
  • What is black box testing?
  • What are some ways to make websites faster?

The interview is not limited to these questions for sure, but they are few to be prepared for sure. Whether technical or behavioral, we need to be ready for our best shot. As it is a technical field, everything can go up and downs for you as a matter of fact, but your skillset is always there to help. A proper blend is what we need and their application is what we focus for. Start preparing and practicing for the interviews without thinking twice because you have a big bunch to eat and digest wisely.

--

--

IndyWise

IndyWise is gen-next career and leadership mentoring platform. We help individuals & companies grow to the next level.