- Activities: what questions do you have about the activities that a software developer does on a daily basis?
What projects are you currently working on? How many projects are you usually working on at once? Do you generally work on parts/elements of a whole project or work on things from start to product completion?
- Environment: what questions do you have about the overall environment and culture of this workplace?
How is the company set up (broken into teams? etc.) and how do they all support/interact with each other? Where is the company looking to grow in the next 1, 5, 10 years?
- Interactions: what questions do you have about the team at this company? What do you hope to see in your interactions during the shadow?
What have been some of the best experiences you've had working with someone where you've made a good connection? Are there specific types of projects that you feel foster more connection with your coworkers, and what are they?
- Objects: what questions do you have about the code or the product?
As a front end dev at a data security firm what are you actually working on?
- Users: what questions do you have about how the company interacts with their users?
- Activities: what was engaging to the person/people you shadowed?
He was very open to answer any questions we had whether they were realted to what we were going over in his code, or not. He spoke on his daily activies, the way in which his team works and how he interacts with them on a daily basis. It was extremely helpful to chat with him about the ins and outs of his schedule.
- Environment: what did you notice about how they talked about the culture and environment of this company?
As a fully remote company (pre-covid) he said there was already a huge amount of "remote" culture instilled in the company, but to be honest we didnt speak too much about the culture.
- Interactions: what did you notice about your interactions with this person/people?
He was very kind and helpful. Seemed very please/happy in his role.
- Objects: what did you learn about their approach to code and/or product development?
He walked us through the architecture of the project he was working on, he was helpful, friendly, and didn't talk down to us at all which i appreciated greatly. That showed me that he is willing to teach, wants to help others understand, and prioritizes learning.
- Users: what did you learn about their approach to their users?
Their app was not quite in beta testing, so there hadn't been much user interact yet. He mentioned that he was predicting a lot of refactoring/redesign after the users begin interacting with the site.
- What are your main takeaways from the shadow? How will you use this information to help you with your job search strategy?
He gave us some amazing insight on how to discuss/inquire to the organization of a company/tech team and how to ask the right questions to get informative answers. "What is your onboarding process? What am I expected to be able to do by the end of onboarding? Who can I go to with questions, or what resources are there to help me solve these questions on my own?"
- Pick a successful project and write about it with the STAR method (What was the situation/scenario of the project? What was the task/target of the project? What action steps did you take? What were the results?):
I was a part of a project set with a week long deadline to learn and implement new technologies in a group setting. We decided to learn about Progressive Web Apps and implementing React Hooks for our project. We met and came up with a concept for our app, did some initial research and made a plan for the week on how to implement the new technologies. Throughout the length of the project, we followed our initial plan, but also made sure to check in frequently and reasses the plan and adjust as needed. We ended up having to reevaluate a few times but were succeesful in implementing our app and even entered it into a demo competition.
- Write about a time you failed and what you learned from that experience:
I pride myself on being a great team member and being able to relate to the people quite easily. However I was recently on a team where I couldn't break through to one of the memebers. We were butting heads on ideas and finding it hard to find collaboration moments. In the end we had a couple discussions about the workflow and found a middle ground for us to balance our ideas on. Our project was successful in the end and it was a great experience for me to learn that I'm not always going to be able to see eye to eye with everyone i work with, but I CAN always find a way to work with someone else for the sake of the project.
- Write about how you've approached working with a team using a specific example:
The first thing I do when beginning work with a team is have in depth conversations about everyones favorite styles of work and collaboration. This gets everything out front and helps with the planning process.
- What other stories will you prepare to share?
I would like to talk about my experience working in many different industries and continually looking for ways to learn more. I have never seen an industry comprabale to software developement in the
- Do some research into your top companies' tech stacks; what do you already know? What can you compare to your own learning? What do you need to learn more about?
I want to get a better understanding of some of the basics of back end technologies like RoR and maybe SQL to have a better understanding of how my work would overlap or play into the backend tech stack.
- Using this interview prep resource doc, pick out at least 3 resources you will use to prepare for interviews as well as 3 behavioral questions you could practice:
- Linkedin, Glassdoor, and networking
- Refining my answers to the above questions and working on the best way to spin my previous experience into marketable and competative talking points!