The Ultimate Technical Interview - Joseph & Jesse

Your host: Joseph Maxwell, Founder and CEO of SwiftOtter & Jesse Maxwell, Tech Lead at SwiftOtter

Show Notes

Are you interested in moving up as a developer? Or, maybe you just aren’t happy where you’re at and you’re curious what an interview looks like at a healthy, growing agency?

Whether it’s at a new company or the one you currently work at, interviews can be stressful. You rarely know what questions will be asked, what the interviewer will be like, or how to prepare for success. On this episode of Smash the Bug, Joseph is in the hot seat, interviewing for a developer position at SwiftOtter. Jesse is an experienced and effective interviewer, but Joseph hasn’t been interviewed by an employer in more than a decade. Let this interview inspire you and help you to prepare for the next big move in your career!

Perfect and complete knowledge is never going to be the expectation of an interviewee or a developer in general, but the way these interview questions are answered is what’s important. If a developer doesn’t know the answer to the question right away, do they know WHERE to find the answer? Do they believe they have “arrived” and don’t need any help, or do they have the heart of a student? Are they aware of their (real) weaknesses and able to be honest about where they can grow? 

Great interviewers will dive deep into your experiences in order to understand the kinds of challenges you’ve faced. Chatting about terms and facts for a little while is great, but nothing speaks louder than real experience and the chance to explain how a problem came about, how you found the root cause of it, and what you (and your team) did to solve that problem. This communicates to the employer that you have the ability to debug the platform they’re going to have you working on, and that you can apply your skills to high-stress problem-solving situations.

This interview pushed Joseph to explain how and why he entered into the PHP/ecommerce development space, what a few of his key career advances have been, and what has propelled him to where he is now. Diving deeper into the more difficult questions, Jesse asked him to explain where his skillset needs to improve and how he deals with “brick wall situations” where an urgent problem is presented and a solution must be found quickly. Moving forward, Joseph explains his most recent accomplishment that made him feel satisfied and confident with the end results. This is important, because a good developer is not necessarily one who fixes a bunch of problems all the time, but a developer who fixes problems correctly, with attention to detail and focus on the long-term reliability of the solution.

What might set SwiftOtter interviews apart from the rest is the rapid fire questions that Jesse incorporates into the process. These questions will determine if a developer has a healthy understanding of the platforms and tools that they work with. Since ecommerce developers often have to think quickly and start problem solving with very little up-front information, this is an effective way to figure out if a candidate is going to work well with the team they would be placed with. The best way to be prepared for questions like these is to review your recent projects and bugs you’ve fixed. If you don’t have any, that is on YOU. If your current job isn’t challenging you enough, you’ve got to start working on side projects. In this episode, Joseph gives a few examples of things you can start doing to sharpen your skills and expand your knowledge if your agency or current position is causing you to be stagnant! 

As always, this podcast exists to inspire, educate and entertain ecommerce developers who are serious about improving their skills and advancing their careers!

(Theme music courtesy of Trending Audio)