What skills are expected from entry level software engineers at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter?

FLAG company SW engineer skills.org

Source: John L. Miller, former staff engineer at Google.

I can tell you the things I look for when interviewing a pending or recent graduate:

1. Passion, intelligence, communication skills.
2. Able to explain their thinking, approach, and analyze strengths / weaknesses of an approach.
3. Good problem solving, ability to iterate on solutions. Quick thinking.
4. Clear understanding of boundary between what they do and don’t know.
5. Good attitude.

For technical skills, I hope to find solid knowledge of core data structures and algorithms, and good, accurate coding skills.

For example:

• Knowledge of linked lists, binary trees, k-ary trees, tries, lists, heaps, queues, stacks, multidimensional arrays. All standard operations on these.
• Hash tables and hashing.
• Various sorts: bubble, insert, merge, quicksort.

And whatever else qualifies as core these days.

Finally, understanding of space, time, and complexity tradeoffs of algorithms.