What I learned applying as a graduate Software Engineer

2024-01-20, 10 minutes reading for Graduates and Juniors

About more than a year ago(before LLMs) I was with a friend tossing project ideas to work on, I threw the idea of training a model to help us pass interviews, it boiled down to piping Zoom audio stream into speech to text then into a language model trained on answering software dev questions, and finally have the answers rendered onto a screen, this was of course before LLMs such as Chatgpt, and as of writing this I'm actually quite surprised no one has attempted to do that yet!

Fast forward to this year, after completing my 2nd industry internship, I went back to uni to continue my 2nd degree, only to drop it after a couple of months. I started applying to graduate positions.

In this post I discuss my journey of applying to dozens of graduate positions.

For starters, landing an internship is much easier than a graduate position, this is because the pool of candidates is much bigger for graduate roles(which may include people who graduated 2 years before) than penultimate students.

I was mainly applying for Backend Software engineer, Devops or SRE roles, not many roles for the later two though. Being early career, I tried to explore different industries because I wanted to discover what is out there and to discover myself. About 10% of my time, I also applied to positions that I didn't have much experience in such as System Administrator, Project Manager, and even Technical recruiter. The hope was maybe I stumble upon something interesting(inspired by simulated annealing).

The whole application process for graduate positions and internships can take up to 1.5-3 months. The highest number of rounds that I have done to get to the final round is 7 rounds, and the shortest is 2 rounds, while the average is 4 rounds. These rounds could be spread across days or weeks, while others could be back to back. Each face to face interview can last from 30-90 minutes.

And the probability of passing an interview is described by this simple model:

Shared experience
The candidate knowledge is the yellow circle and the interviewer knowledge is the blue circle. The intersection represent the shared knowledge between the candidate and the interviewer, which also represent the probability of passing the interview. The bigger the intersection, the higher your chances. So in order to have a higher chance of passing an interview, you need to share their values, culture, stack etc.

Interview questions

Here are some of the harder technical questions that I was quizzed on:

  • Explain SOLID principles
  • Why doesn't Python support multi-threading
  • Difference between:
    • Process vs Thread
    • Kernel thread vs Green thread
    • UDP and TCP
    • UserSpace vs Kernel space
    • Container vs Virtual machine
  • In latency sensitive environment, why is disabling intel's hyper-threading beneficial
  • When you use the command free what do these columns represent used free shared buff/cache available
  • What do you know about Intel's Speculative execution bug
  • Explain CPU pinning and why it's important
  • In Kubernetes, how would you ensure that certain tasks or commands are executed prior to the start of a pod
  • What steps would you take to diagnose a production issue
  • How does C++ polymorphism works under the hood? What happens under the hood when a method is invoked
  • A lot of questions about data structures and algorithms either during interview or online assessment
    • The hardest online assessment was from a recruitment company asking me to solve Armstrong number in under 20 minutes

And the hardest non-technical question:

  • Tell me about a time when you did not see the full picture?
buzz buzz
Hover/Touch to see the 'full picture'

Lessons learned

Here is some advice I've learned a long the way:

  • Passion over total compensation1 and culture trumps technical expertise
  • Engineers like to see personal projects that show technical depth, meaning that you used your engineering skills to plan, architect and weight the different decisions/stacks/design etc
  • Take risk and don't be afraid of applying to opportunities outside of your home city or home country
  • Build a professional industry network early on, preferably before graduating
  • Don't get emotionally invested/attached to a company that you are applying for, it's quite risky as getting rejected might take you a while to recover from
  • In Australia, most corporate graduate programs open during Feb-March and Aug-Sep. If you are applying outside these periods, it's normal not to find many openings
  • If you have time, complete the interview process even if you are no longer interested in the company, you could meet interesting people or get a different perspective on the company, or simply use it as a practising interview
  • During behavioural interview, don't repeat your memorised response; instead, try to find an angle where you could integrate their values into your response
  • Being culture fit goes both way, when assessing offers ask yourself do you feel comfortable in X culture or were you just pretending during the interview

If I were to go back to uni, I would take an elective in theatrical acting, people skill is underrated in engineering academia.

Resume and cover letter

Your resume and cover letter should be version controlled and each tailored application should be a different branch, tailor your cover letter for every company(I know it's hard work) by integrating their values into your cover letter.

Behavioural assessment

It's imperative that you demonstrate passion for the role that you are applying. As previously stated, don't repeat your memorised response; instead, try to find an angle where you could integrate their values into your response. In general, there are only a limited number of behavioural questions that they can possibly ask, the questions are usually around their values, so I have one long document of all questions that I have been asked or likely to get asked in the future. I study and extend this document before every interview.

Upskilling

It's very crucial that you upskill while you look for a job. Being a fast learner is much more valuable than your current experience2. One way to upskill and meet new people is to go to technical meetup in your area. It can feel overwhelming, but remember Rome wasn't built in a day, so don't get intimidated by your people who know X much more than you; we all start somewhere.

df/dx

For example I often hear conversations the first week of class where somebody will be bemoaning, "Oh so-and-so knows blah-blah-blah, how am I ever going to catch up to them?" Well, if you're one of the people who knows blah-blah-blah it's bad news for you because honestly everyone is going to catch up really quickly. Before you know it that advantage is going to be gone and if you aren't learning too you're going to be behind.

Note: I have ground Leetcode, I do enjoy solving algorithm related problems for my personal projects, but these are rare. I really would like to advice against doing Leetcode, but unfortunately most high profile tech companies have cemented Leetcode style problems into their assessment process. I have spent hundreds of hours on Leetcode solving easy and medium problems. Yet I've failed on easy problem assessment3. With these hours, maybe I improved my programming skill by 1-2%, I think I would've been much better off if I had build an actual software instead that people can use.

Click/Touch to Play
TIL the other meaning of Grind

Fin

Finding the first job can be quite daunting, and finding one that truly fits is even more challenging(the one that you pretend the least). If you didn't get the offer that you aimed for, think about how you could make most out of your current job, aim for a secondary goal, maybe things move slow at your current job, then use this time to upskill, or maybe your current jobs exposes you to different people so use it to form new friendship. It's very crucial that you don't give up, because, as you go on with your life, your passion will probably change, so don't stress too much where your at, rather focus on you what steps would you take to reach your future goals.

We're all pretending, so find the job that you pretend the least
1

Although it's very hard to be passionate about something you don't have exposure to or aren't being exposed to ↩

2

A lecture by Professor John Ousterhout ↩

3

Yeeaas, I did focus on understanding concepts and forming patterns rather than memorizing solution ↩

Extra

Uncommon requests

Some very uncommon requests(outside the norm) I've found companies requesting:

  • One third party assessment platform required candidates to install a mobile phone application to record a professional video for a behavioural assessment.
  • A minimum of two professional references, to be clear this was needed after the final interview, but still, a graduate role is suppose to expose you to the workforce.
  • Submitting a government issued ID that proves you have legal working rights in Australia on an online applications(initial stage) before getting any assessments or interviews.
  • Requiring account creation for a one time behavioural assessments
    • I have a Leetcode account and I done the grinding myself. I have met people grinding Leetcode, but I have never met people grinding behavioural assessments, and I hope this doesn't turn into another cotton industry
    • Some of these assessment platforms may use your data for other purposes
  • Specifically asking about secondary/high school grades for a graduate position

Unexpectedly 💣ing the interview 🍿

Almost all interviewer were quite nice, sure there were a few odd ones, but overall petty good.

The worst interview experience is when I applied to a job ad in early August with a fairly big engineering focused company. One of the key criteria was knowledge in "C or C++". At uni, I had done 3 units on C working with concurrency, multithreading and multiprocessing libraries, read a beginner book on C (years back) and I had a couple of small projects. So I was fairly confident in my ability.

My application got accepted, and I was clear with the recruiter on the phone that I had no experience in C++, I only had experience in C, nonetheless after completing their coding assessment, which required rudimentary knowledge in C++, I was moved to the next round.

The recruiter told me that the upcoming interview was about getting to know me and my previous experience. Joined a Zoom interview, the senior engineer was clearly very busy, and after a short introduction, the engineer - who had my resume open - asked me whether I knew C++, to which I replied No, I have only coded in C, nonetheless he asks me whether it was OK if he quizzed me on C++, it took me a couple of seconds to reply with OK. The questions gradually got harder, and obviously I failed to answer the later ones properly, he ended the interview as soon as I failed to answer the question properly. It felt like I 💣ed the interview, it was as if the interview was concluded before it even started.

I'm guessing that either the engineer thought I lied my way though the application process or there was miscommunication between the recruiter and the engineer expectation. As of writing this in mid November 2023, the job ad is still up on Linkedin.