Beginners Guide to Hiring the Best Nearshore Sr. Software Engineers: 15 Focus Areas

Technical interviews give a person a chance to investigate a candidate's skills, personality, problem-solving ability, and knowledge of the job. This article provides a high-level view of formal technical interviews anyone can do by looking closely at technical focus areas and typical questions asked in over 4,000+ actual software engineering interviews at Framework Science.

Introduction to Sr Software Engineers

In a Nutshell: Someone who is a Senior Software Engineer may have a lot of technical experience and solve complex problems. So Ideally, they will be in a position where they'll be able to oversee other people in their team, draw up iterative delivery schedules, teach others best practices within the Software Industry. 

15 Focus areas to ask Sr. Software Engineers

Make sure they have the critical thinking skill you need. Depending on the work, the Sr Software Engineer will have different skills. For example, if their work is more specialized, they might need to know more niche technologies, but they may not need as much technical knowledge for less niche work.

1. Check out their portfolio or online profiles to see what kind of projects they've worked on and what skills they may have for your task. It's also an excellent way to quickly weed out candidates who haven't had nearly as many projects as you would want them to have, according to the job listing.

2. You may be able to glean more information from them during your interview if they've done specific related projects, and it's a good thing to ask if they have.

3. It's also crucial for you to ask questions that target their knowledge of technology so you can clarify some of their responses or fill in the gaps with your queries. 

4. Try to get a sense of where they are in their career and ask them what they want to learn.

5. What projects they've done. (good and bad experiences and reasons why)

6. What they've accomplished and why they consider themselves a good fit for the position. They should have enthusiasm throughout the interview, and it shouldn't seem as though they are going through the motions. 

7. Ask them to describe a technical problem they have solved recently. 

8. Then ask them to describe the solution and how they implemented the solution. 

9. If you talk to a software developer, they must explain how they approached a problem and the tradeoffs made during the implementation process. The answer you are looking for is where their experience in the industry has helped them develop certain traits which are necessary for success. 

10. For example, ask the Sr software developer to describe how they overcame a technical problem. 

11. Were you working with other developers on the project?

12. Did they run into any technical or non-technical roadblocks that required them to articulate how they would overcome them? It gives the developer a chance to tell you about their past experiences. It gets them thinking about how they're going to tackle a challenging situation you've laid out for them, even though it's hypothetical.

13. Prepare and read aloud a list of data from a hypothetical situation to understand what the interviewee would do. For example, if you wanted to know what the candidate would do if the program returned 5 million rows from the database, and one of those rows resulted in an error message when you tried to output it, what would they do?

• Would such a probe of their technical genius tell you if this was someone who would be able to think through problems under pressure while being onboarded into a situation where they didn't have access to Google or Stackoverflow?
• You see, technical preparation isn't about understanding if someone can use Java, e.g., Technical Interviews are all about gauging the potential Software engineers' ability to think quickly and cogently under pressure, to make sure the correct decision is made. In other words, technical expertise isn't enough.

14. Ask to describe any exciting projects they’re currently working on and what makes them so attractive.

15. Assess the candidate's ability to make decisions. Sometimes a hypothetical job situation will be advanced enough to see if there are decisions that need to be made. Ask the candidate what they would do if they had to make a decision, such as "Should we dump all these data records?'' e.g.

Conclusions

If you couldn't tell, it's looking for someone capable of navigating trade-offs and understanding complexity. Your best strategy for finding such a person is to begin the process by considering how they think.