I ask this question to every Backend Engineer I interview
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- Опубликовано: 27 май 2024
- Light video today discussing my interviewing skills for software engineering positions. I always ask this open ended question and allow the candidate to go free.
0:00 Background on Interviews
5:00 Interview Question
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@@hnasr so you pay to be a member even if you are the owner of the channel? how many subscribers do you need to have this feature? I really like it !!!! I want to use it!
@Hussein Nasser Do you have a course for absolute beginners on backend? if yes I'll like to enroll
Enjoying your content
2:54 for the question
Thanks
Correction - the start of the question. I'm at 4:42 and still don't know what the question is.. Prob would have walked out of the "interview" by now.
9:16 for the uneasy question
Answer: ruclips.net/video/2FTkEhEqzIg/видео.html
FUN FACT - There are a lot of interviewers who want to show off their skills other than evaluating the candidate. Everyone is different and every problem can be solved differently. Thanks Nasser for speaking out loud. ✌️
The kind of people who ask about a database isolation level
Yes u r right I've had the exp when the interviewer was talking instead of me during all interview and I got the offer lol
She ended up accepting another offer. Totally relatable.
she: I can optimise your reverse proxy
company : ok here’s your offer
she: ‘meh’
I gave my first interview last week and it was just like this.I got the offer. My first job ! Thanks Hussein for awesome guides you have on your channel.When i watch your videos i more driven towards what i am doing .
Congrats!!!
@@hnasr thanks :)
Why would you apply for any job unless you are a Senior Developer? If you are unemployed you aren't good enough to work in the industry so why are you wasting peoples time?
@@BillClinton228 To get job as junior developer?
@@BillClinton228 somehow you just answered your self if you realise it.
This is one of the questions that I ask when I take interviews. Not the exact question - but something similar where answers are open ended. Asking these kind of questions will allow even the interviewer to gain knowledge. Sometimes you get brilliant answers that you would have never even thought of before.
The same question to ask by my interviewer and the ans given by me is the same as he said in the video about optimising the query and adding indexing to the database and also talk about frontend.
I have given almost 7 technical interviews and cracked each one without solving coding questions as he said getting the right code does not matter if you invest to develop something is important.
I absolutely love your enthusiasm when you speak about the interviewer's response, and how their eyes open up. I actually am dying to have one of those conversations. Cant get past the recruiters though
If someone asked me that I would probably like to ask them back what position exactly I'm being interviewed for
Exactly why I posted my comment just now lol
be careful not to come off as a know-it-all asshole!
started watching your videos from some time, must say that the way you explain and discuss things is very impressive and rare at the same time.
Thanks a ton !
If I gave this as an interview question, I'd expect the first part of the response to be a couple of clarifying questions, like..
Is it EXACTLY 60 seconds each time?
When the UI "freezes" does it become completely and totally unresponsive?
Those two alone will narrow it down a lot. If it is exactly 60 seconds each time to the millisecond then I doubt it will be a data access issue, even the in built query caching will be sufficient to return it faster the next time, and if the input variables change each time you would expect the time it takes to respond to also vary. The data is eventually displayed, so it's not going to be a timeout issue. If it's a WebUI and that's freezing, then you're maybe looping through an incredibly large data set which just happens to take 60 seconds to process. If it's an application UI freezing, you probably only have a single thread and you're going everything in there. From there there's still a huge amount of possibilities for what it could be, and an even larger of ways for testing for each of them.
My money is on clicking the button sets a cron job to run in exactly 59 seconds, and takes 1 second to complete
😂😂😂
It is a JavaScript UI (React) and the Dev did a setTImeout(getData, 59000)... Thinking being that they can get a tuneup contract in 3/4 months and come in and just remove the setTimeout
My take home here is the God feeling thing you said
@@gavinharris8619 😂😂 best answer so far.
Shit, very insightful. Thank you for this
tfw Thread.sleep(60000)
@Hussein, I really love to hear you talking. You amaze me with your tremendous knowledge and keenness to learn new things.
Software Engineering is a rampage now a days but you not only teach us new things but also how to become a calm, cool and a passionate Engineer. Kudos to you ! Please keep up the great work !
❤️❤️ thank you Abhinav
Unless it's an entry-level job, all questions should be general like this. It's virtually impossible to have good knowledge of all technologies, so not knowing something shouldn't be viewed as a bad thing - it's how you go about learning that is important.
Adjust the speed to 1.25x and now you are perfect to go. BTW, great video!
Right 😁
You mean 1.5 lol
haha thanks
Chill dude
Thanks, i was at 1.5x
This is how interviews should go. Love it.
This is the question I’d like to receive during my interview! I strongly
agree with your approach. Giving open questions without one/two right answers gives a huge opportunity to discuss the topic and also allows interviewee to shine in some areas where they feel strong.
I appreciate the video! And immediately subscribing. Cheers! 🙌
Hussein, you truly inspire me and I hope to gather enough wisdom sometime in the future to do what you do and put my ideas and help other people on the internet.
Great question. Highlights how they approach problems and break them down. I’m a full stack bootcamp instructor. My students like to rush to writing code to fix an issue. I tell them slow down and walk through the whole stack to find the problem.
Love that you ask real world questions of things which would happen. I have always felt it is much better to just talk about the real thing you face in your company. If they can bring something to the discussion, excellent. If an interview is handled more like a conversation you get a much better view of the candidates and they can understand what they will be facing.
6 minutes to ask the damn simple question. 😂
I have been through these types of questions in my interviews many times and I can absolutely relate to what he is talking about.
I can binge watch your channel and computerphile for my whole life guys you're the best
Wow, thank you so much for the great content, Hussein! This interview question really opens my mind, and it is also a great question to ask other people when we want to learn things from different perspectives. I just started learning backend engineering, and I've been following your tutorial. Thank you!!
all the best in your journey Tony! enjoy the process and stay hungry
Good question Hussein! I like it very much because it really tests someone's troubleshooting skills. When you have a problem in Production that is affecting customers you need it solved as soon as possible and you definitely want to hire a developer who can do that. Knowing how to troubleshoot problems comes with experience and you can easily tell if someone has never done much of it before. It also amazes me when a developer won't even look at the available logs when there is a problem.
This is my second visit to your videos. Such a genuine effort by you. Basically reflects your genuine personality! Keep it going!
Thank you for your kind words ❤️
The generalist actually emerges as the most productive in the age of cloud computing. I think what your getting at in this vid is that fundamentals of software engineering doesn't boil down to just algorithmic questions , which I agree with. (learning algorithim was very helpful for me anyways)
Some people built the cloud!
There is no single place that you can pin on for performance issues. It could happen at several levels
1 ) Non indexed foreign key huge tables can cause it
2) Making api call and blocking UI Thread without calling the API async
3) Bad backend code which does not honour coding practises like sold principles, or design patterns.
4) Sending unessary headers
5) In Dot Net, sending native req tbough managed dot net pipeline. e.g Webconfig has property RunAllManageeRequest true. So when Websevers needs load some inage it will send it through dot net framework which is not necessary.
The list goes on.
Great interview question! Thanks for sharing. I much prefer these types of interview questions over regurgitating something I learned in college a million years ago.
It is such a pleasure to even listen to you man, the way you talk and present yourself is so engaging!
one or two troubleshooting questions are great to understand how the person approaches a problem, his knowledge and work experience, and also how he approaches stuff he doesn't know and how it communicates that to others. I love them on both sides of an interview.
Using the sentence that the 'application freezes' clearly means the JS call stack is executing a blocking call which is causing this to happen. That is the only reason. Make your API call ASync and the app will not freeze. Now if you would tell the candidate that the 'API is taking 60 secs' to return the response then they could debug the backend services/proxy for the problem.
Thats a wonderful evaluation process for testing his/her knowledge, experience and thought process towards a solution approach for the problem.
I hope i get asked about this, real engineering question with no bs!
but no, they'll just ask to invert a binary tree 🤷♂️
Thank you, Hussein. I agree with you that giving the open-ended question candidate to check their problem solving skills.
Omg i saw this two days before my interview for a devops position, and I got exactly the same question 😍 Thank you 🙌
wow congratulations, I am learning from the comments too
First thing I would do is to check where exactly the wait is happening, client side or server side. With Wireshark you can see if the reply from the server is taking a long time or not. If not, then I'll investigate on the client, otherwise I'll concentrate the effort on the server. On the server, split again between the database and the actual server application: a breakpoint should be enough to check this.
tcpdump was my first thought, not sure why someone would optimize DB, or a reverse proxy, if the issue is with the mouse...
That's really a good way to assess a candidate instead of being a cocky interviewer by forcing the conversation in 1 direction which the candidate might not have worked on.
These is a very good question. Basically it will show how much the candidate understand how the internet works. And what their strong skill set are focused on. I basically stopped algorithm BS questions. I need to know if the candidate understands how the internet or how web/desktop application works plus the tools involved in them. I usually give simple but architectural complicated projects to my candidates which shows what tools they use, why they use it and how their code is structured. basically with a web browser information, you can easily know what froze the app, like if the whole DOM freezes to if the request gets stuck at connected to if the request gets stuck at receiving data. Chrome network log shows These information that you can use to suspect if it’s the frontend, proxy, Webserver or dB level
Just discovered your channel, your videos are great, you explain things very well and even your accent is fun to listen! Also, it feels like you have fun making videos which is not the case in many other good tech channels.
Thank you Shreyas! Appreciate it 😊
You are the sunshine of my life. thanks for all the data requests with 200
That's a great approach in interviews.
There's no point in stupidly learning stuff, but *understanding* and *thinking* are the most important skills.
yeah except most companies have this inflated ego thinking that you will be building them this new dropbox and you have to know how to design an architecture for 500 millions users with millions requests a second just in case and also you will be starting at an entry position and at this bracket we expect you are working to gain experience aka you might as well pay us...
As a generalist, I got a good chuckle from this. All I 've got is a developed approach to attack that common real-life question. However, level of interest might not be a good gauge as some of us are numb across the board. We get excited once we find the root and deliver the goods.
I am so glad I found this video today! Thank you! I am currently preparing for my interviews and this gives my some peace :)
same here, how was your interview
@@JeemmaiThe interview was fine, even though I did not get the job that time. Got another one, though ;) Each inteview gives more experience and makes the next one easier. Good luck on your interview! 🙌
I actually took psychology after I had my EE degree. And the only great thing I learned there was: "ask open questions, you will get to see much more of a person, than asking for a single answer." And it's so true!
dude I subscribed to your channel just 2 days back. great content. Gonna check all your videos.
Thanks for subbing! welcome to the community, much love
You told the truth bro. Last 3-4 minutes were awesome!!
I think this is a damn good question. My personal short answer would be, distributed tracing tool is designed for this type of question. It will help you to identify how the request time is spent amongst all the microservices in the stack. If you don't have distributed tracing installed, then use mocking technique combine with binary search to first locate the service that has issue, and check the log, dive in.
Google has Dapper for distributed tracing and it is amazing. And but I totally agree. The FIRST step is identifying which layer in the stack is causing/suffering the latency. I would not be too excited about a candidate who immediately chose their favorite layer and then only talked about that. That's like the drunk trying to find his keys and only looks underneath the lamppost because he can't see anything anywhere else.
I really liked the question , if it was me answering the question I would probably borrow some techniques for solving and troubleshooting networking issues which is based on making comparisons between the "normal" behaviour and the one we currently have starting from collecting the information about the situation without analyse anything, after collecting the informations from each part we can compare it to what a normal behaviour should be at that moment we can be quite sure about where we need to fix things.
Finally I found you. Love you hear you always.
It’s actually a very good question to ask.
Also since the question BEGINS with the UI, that's where the investigation begins. First, you begin understanding if the latency traces back to the server. It doesn't mean front-end is your expertise or your crutch. If you start with database performance optimization you're flat out wrong. There's a logical order of progression.
very interesting way to judge a candidate interest I really like it thanks for providing such good info
that 60 second thing is the answer, you look for configs on each part of the stack for timeouts, keepalives, etc for that number (including dns! most people ignore that), if you find something, you start the hunt there...
This is a legit question. Beats all of those typical algorithm based interview questions.
Very nice question, I might add it to my list
Can't agree more with you, in fact, I myself have developed similar open-ended questions with no 1 right answer. It helps me understand the thinking capabilities of the candidate as well. Hypothetical high 5!
Every technical panel/hiring manager has to watch and learn from this
Remarkable, as a bug bounty hunter specializing in various aspects related to Web Applications, I find it incredibly intriguing to come across such discussions.
I will start this first principles thing by physically checking all the cables in all the routing paths from app to the user that will make me busy for awhile while. I might go down to a subatomic level just to check if everything's is alright back there. AS a old saying goes: "Trust but doublecheck".
Also ... having been working with backend stuff for 20+ years ... I must admit, I can't remember the details of quicksort on the spot, apart from it being some recursive bisection.
I would say it's not important to memorize quicksort on the spot and be able to look implement it without looking it up ... it's more important to know that it's O(nlogn) with O(n2) worst case. - and where to look up the actual algorithm.
Even this is not important. You can look it up in a second.
Nice question. It made me think for the solution too.
Well-spoken. Also, a fantastic question to get candidates thinking. Love it.
I do agree with mostly being a generalist whenever you are responsible for the entire stack. In my first position as a professional software engineer, I had to manage the virtual machines, security, maintenance, development pipeline, design, programming, financials, and more. Sadly it wasn't until later I realize what I was capable of or what I was worth. I definitely wouldn't say I was proficient in all of those areas and would definitely say our project timelines as well as the quality of the work could have improved if we delegated (hired) more. Unfortunately, it just wasn't the case.
I also wanted to add, It definitely indicates a level of fluency if they solve the problem with a focused approach, but I wouldn't always assume that's their preferred area. It just may be what they have been mostly exposed to.
Again, I loved the video and your interviewing style!
totally agreed. "Just be yourself". That make me got the job.
I subscribed, because your are my kind of Engineer.
that is good to hear such concern on nity-gritty case after you've dealt with likewise prblm)
I am a career changer in Tech and I will be having my second stage interview in few days for my first job in tech, this video was so helpful. Thank you so much for this Hussein.
Nice Video, Thanks for this great advice.
Man oh man, this is one damn good video!
I love this way of thinking
I would take a TCPDUMP on the client-side and on the server-side and analyze the time taken on the TCP handshake to make sure all good from the network latency perspective, then I will check the DeltaTime between the packets to understand which data is causing the delay. If there is a 60seconds delay from the server-side, next time I would take TCPDUMP in the application server and database server and again analyze what causing increased DeltaTime. This way we can finally get to the entity in the entire stack which is adding the DeltaTime taken of 60seconds, once we identify that then we can tweak its configuration or code accordingly.
Excellent question. And this kind of issues do happen
I love this question. Some IT folks tend to blame other disciplines for performance issues until a case has been made against them. I think this question may bring that tendency to light.
With my systems background I would like to see an approach that involved scoping and isolating the area of the system responsible for the sub optimal performance. Diving in too deep initially in any one area before proper scoping of the issue shows poor troubleshooting technique. Bypass proxy and call web front end directly, call backend directly using code or tools, and run query/stored procedure directly. What did we find? That sort of thing.
The industry should understand this, as our current gen Software Engineering Interviews are more focused on Leetcode problems and Algorithms which a lot of candidates learn by heart from various courses. Yes having a good grasp of Algorithms is important for a SWE but in real world cases the person is going to develop & maintain software services, products. So it is important to know how much Architectural knowledge the person has or how to figure out with problems and come up with some optimize solutions.
my first video and i love it , beautiful content 😅
I so agree! I actually made a video "Why coding interviews suck" They don't prove anything! I also use open questions and I find things that I think they had trouble with in the projects they listed on their CV. When a person dives in to technical depth (not debt) I ask follow up questions and see how they dealt with issues. Then I know what part they've played and what I can expect from them. And I can cage where to put them in the team. Sometimes (like you said) you hear things and think: "They will fit even better on this part or even another team!"
I much rather hire someone, who has no experience in the language or framework that we use but demonstrates the ability to think and problem solve. I know that they'll master that language or framework too. And I especially like it (and I hope they do) tie in their experience with the job outline I gave. I do that always when I apply for a project as freelancer. I am honest saying what I have no experience with but that I am willing to learn, and I drive home the experiences I have and they miss.
I just joined a team who does SSIS/SQL reporting that needs to migrate to the cloud. I never worked with SSIS (and I don't care about it, and made that very clear) and I am not really a SQL backend developer (I use SQL only to select data and I can tune SQL, don't care for SQL stored procedures because it's ugly). But I know CI/CD, I know how to get COTS applications to conform to CD, all of them are different and all of them require specialized attention and we will figure that out.
I have a wealth of infrastructure experience, not as much on Azure but that translates well, and a more than you have as we already ran on Azure with a COTS application. And I give reasons as to why they need IaC, and why they need to stop using SQL scripts to promote changes but start using dtproj file to build SSIS and use dacpac files. All terms they had never heard before.
So they were like: "This guy doesn't know SSIS/SQL, but he's obviously a developer who has coded ETL and knows and demonstrated knowledge about packages of SSIS. And he knows CI/CD, IaC and is pragmatic in the approach fitting with out 15 year old application. And he comes from CISO. We call CISO and het a reference." Well the reference was good so I started the next week.
Because sometimes things can sound too good to be true. I've done a lot and anticipated a lot and they just verified that with my former PO.
And they were sold when he said: "He's coming back to this company? Why didn't he come back to CISO? I am a bit sad about that!"
Agree greatly with your approach!
i can attest to this. this is the most successful kind of question you can ask
good point about the interviewers and interviewees view about the hiring.
And THIS is a great question and attitude towards job interview. Interviewee doesn't feel completely stupid and demotivated because he/she talked about the topic they know and just couldn't answer a question or two so he/she comes out of the interview with the feeling "Maybe I couldn't answer the second question but at least I got the first one. So maybe I'm not complete utter rubbish at this"
Wow, this is absolutely a great style of question. Give them carte blanche and let them talk.
Your content is gold man. As a DevOps Engineer (and Backend Dev) this is a really powerful question. I would like to know one of your answers for this interview question (if possible sure haha).
Check your drive for activity (cache overrun, reentrant logging), but based on 30 years experience the problem is in the database!! Next, your JVM needs more memory. Also, I think you can be actual full stack - but you have to spend years doing non-programming - a few years SQL development and maybe 5 as DB Admin, network manager, system admin, etc. And to be really good at backend, it helps to have built some front end level stuff.
My best indicator of someone that will be fantastic is if they have a lab at home. Every single person that has something like a RaspPi cluster, or their own Kubernetes rack at home has been phenomenal and work far and above the normal 40 hour person.
Thanks, I needed to hear this. 🖖
Indeed that reverse proxy thingy is very interesting to implement
My first thought: Sounds like a blocking (sync) function somewhere is hitting a timeout (60 sec).
I always log function calls with timestamps so I think I would figure it out pretty fast.
Great points in this video as always!
This was an educative and entertaining watch
Amazing video , I really enjoy your content .
You sir ... are awesome!
Holy shit the ad was placed perfectly
One really great question to ask in an interview is, "What is the hardest software problem that you tackled and solved?" And then a related question, "What is the hardest software problem that you've attempted to solve but failed to actually solve?"
BTW, how would you optimize a reverse proxy.....really curious to know🤔
Abhishek Agarwal so many things, load balancing algorithms, timeouts, backend connection pooling, caching.. there are things an engineer can do out of the box and there are instances where they might need to switch reverse proxy or worse case customize a brand new one..
Everyday I learn new things which make this question even more broad and take time to answer
@@hnasr That's awesome! Thank you.
@@hnasr Also interested in knowing about debugging such issues. Waiting for a video on rev.proxy/nginx
@@hnasr how can I work for you? 😬
first time hear this kind of question, really interesting
Perfect my whole career is a coin flip
This video would be the perfect example in a class about "Beating around the bush".
thanks for this video , what interpels me is the Administring Arcgis book you have in the top of your library , greetings from a GIS engineer :)
Day 5 🔥
😂😂 Why I feel I take interview to showoff my skills to them, but yeah look forward his/her pragmatic approach towards the solution.
This is what a work very frequently. End to end latency analysis of the product.
This is an excellent approach. Candidates should be treated with courtesy. The whole stack is not our expertise.
Excellent tips! 👍
I'm a Frontend developer.
So personally I'd:
first use something like postman and see if it still takes like 60sec to retrieve response if not then the Frontend is okay
let's move on
then is backend I'd check how log it takes to get to bd stuff
like:
app.get('/someroute', (req, res) => {
console.time('xyz')
/*None be stuff like validations, processing etc. goest here*/
console.timeEnd('xyz')
/*Database stuff goes here*/
})
if none db stuff takes lot of time then we need to optimize backend codes else we'd need to check the database(relations, structures etc.)
also I'd love to hear your desired answer