Hey Sean, great video once again. My questions are: 1 What do you hope to gain or accomplish by adding a new engineer to your team. 2 What are a few of the most important qualities you would like to see in a new teammate.
Sounds like some good questions to ask, Sean! Some questions I’ve asked are: - What about this company/team has kept you here for so long (if they’ve been with company for a while)? - Can you tell me an opportunity for improvement in the team that I can focus on helping once I join the team? - Where do you see this team in the next 5 years (as in growth, changes, etc)?
0:18 That's me until I realized I should've prepared some questions. Did this too many times and tried to ask the dumbest question you could ever hear because I had to think fast... Thank you for the video and the series!
Sean Allen I meant front of my interviewer. Anyway I did it today and at then end he appreciate that I bring my questions on a paper. It proves that you care about the job and are serious about the role.
I recently had the opportunity to interview with a principal engineer at a large web company who mentioned he had been there for 5 years and had seen a lot of change in his time there. At the end of the interview I asked him what were the most interesting and profound changes he had seen during his time there, which led to a fantastic discussion about tech stacks and productivity, interoperability between teams, migration to services as the team grew, changes to team dynamics, and more. So if the interviewer has been there for a while, I'd ask what things have changed, and what has improved as a result of it. This shows forward thinking on your part, and really challenges the interviewer to reflect on the company, which subsequently lets you have a discussion about how you have grown yourself, and how you learn and adapt.
Hey Sean, thanks for this video. My two questions usually are the two first that you point. 1. Swift or obj-c and from this one will bring branches of other questions that you talked about. 2. Storyboard or code and from this one refers the team, size and levels, the management, procedures, merge conflicts solutions if there is storyboard and code politics. I guess I can squeeze there about the environment. I had interviewed with regular tech companies and finance banking and they are different environments on refers to engineers. Sample: dresses code.
Hey Sean! Just subbed but really like your videos and I am in the stage of searching for an iOS job. Sadly the market in norway is really bad but ill manage. Really like these types of videos, alot of good questions i havent thought about but are really important to me. Keep going strong!
One thing I've been asking during phone screens which helps get me to the next round is "What does success look like for your engineers and how do you measure that?" They're always quite impressed and some interviewers even get stumped on what the answer is.
Hi Sean, I’m trying to find a solution for a question that was asked in one of my interviews. The question was if the user need to scroll through thousands of links that have images and labels in an iOS app how we can make our app performs better like smooth scrolling. As per my knowledge I answered that we can load JSON data asynchronously on the background thread and load the UI on the main thread. Furthermore, instead of accessing the web server again and again we can use NSCahe lazy loading to scrolling smooth. But It works only for a few images or small data not for thousands of links. Interviewer asked me that my solution works only for a couple of links what if user need to scroll through a thousand links? Please give me your insight . Thanks for your time.
I'm not sure what the interviewer was looking for, but in this situation, I'd likely make the network call to only load like 25 at a time... once the user gets to the bottom of the list, make another network call to pull in the next 25. (25 is an arbitrary number... can be whatever is a quick download). You'll see this method used in apps like instagram and twitter once you get to the end of the loaded posts.
One of the most common ways is to break down your app into multiple storyboards. This is subjective, but once I start to get more than 3 View Controllers in a storyboard, I start to think about how I can separate some VCs out into their own storyboard. So, the typical answer is to use MANY storyboards and keep things separated. I disagree with Simranpreet's comment. There are plenty of serious companies here in Silicon Valley that are using storyboards. Lyft is a pretty big one.
Hey, Sean, if you're considering getting into backend development as well, what technologies would you be looking at? The Swift-based Kitura/Vapor frameworks or something more stable like Python or Java frameworks? As always, thanks for the great advice!
I haven't fully figured this one out yet. I'll probably learn using a non-swift language... this way if server side Swift every does catch on, there won't be as much to learn since I'll already know Swift.
My fav questions to ask: "What's been your least favorite period here?" "What do you most dislike about working here?" "What is the process for ideation to shipping?" "How does the company/team recover from a wreck?" "Has the team ever done a death-march"?
I like these... I like the idea of asking about the "bad" stuff. I gotta ask tho... what do you mean by "death-march"? I haven't heard that term as it relates to software development. Maybe it means killing off a feature?
well each car has a device which send the co-ordinates of the car to the server and with the help of these co-ordinates the map-pins has been pointed on the map and that API is called again again and which plots the pins(cars) on the map which make them feel like they are moving.
The question I always ask is "What technologies they are using at the backend.. the API's and all that stuffs" and one thing that i love to ask is about the "skill development" what are the TL or VP does to improve the skill's of the programer, through pushing the developer to think out of the box and make something productive out of it. And if I give interview to the Product Based company I always ask what pod's and third party library they are using. If any , what would they do if that library/pod got deprecated or get closed in future. because I have seen may product based companies which don't use any third party library in there project... BTW I find this video very helpful Thanks.
How brutal are these interview for JR. Developer's? Thats really all that I fear because I don't wanna be asked a question that I don't know or sit there looking bad for not being able to answer a question. Have you ever encountered a situation where an interviewer asks you questions that you do not know of? Exactly how much swift or OBCJ knowledge are they expecting us to have? Ive done some of the coding challenges at this point and for me they weren't exactly easy tasks to complete.
I like this series, it's good. I"ve been writing code for a long time, some high performance, cluster number crunching, opencl, openmp and I've never, ever had to use one of those interview alogrithms. Use a binary search on a cluster? a fibanicci sequence on a GPU? Uhm no. It's about things like inverting and solving massive covariance matrices. Using the GPU pipeline to crunch massive amount of 3D data in real-time. So I've never had to use this basic stuff but I do appreciate very much the heads up on what the interviewers are looking for. Big Thanks.
Agreed... Most whiteboard questions aren't relevant to day to day iOS development. But, most companies ask those types of questions, so you gotta play the game (if you are interested in one of those types of jobs, that is).
I guess I just don't "get it" why they ask those questions. I recently had an interview where they asked about recurrsion, my reply was what is the context? Is this to run on AWS searching a big database? run this on a GPU pipeline? ?? I guess they didn't like my answer, I didn't get the position. So I'm watching your videos :-)
I think asking these questions may turn off the companies a little bit in the sense that you asking if a company uses a particular language or technology may sound like you are not willing to put in the work to learn new things (obviously not saying this is the case with you). You may probably ask these questions after you get an offer in hand. I think a company would much rather give an offer to someone who can be fresh out of college and hungry for interesting work (and doesn’t care about swift/obj-c or code/storyboards) rather that someone who asks these kind of questions at the first stage of the interview process (and treats some of these questions as deal breakers). Just my 2 cents
Of course every company is going to be different. And every developer is different. What questions to ask is very situational, which is why these are some suggestions and not a comprehensive list. Not that it’s wrong, but I think your point of view comes from someone trying to get “any” job. Some developers may have options, so they are looking for a very specific tech stack or technical environment. Again, I’m not saying you’re wrong, just pointing out that different devs will have different motives and desires. It’s a very nuanced topic.
I feel like (at least in my experience) asking certain questions (if the codebase is in objc/swift or coding programmatically/Storyboard), while these may certainly ease you in the company IF you get an offer, they also weaken your performance and may make you sound weak (newbie iOS dev because it sounds like you barely have worked with obj-c). IMHO. You asked Lyft engineers about delegation - even if you were genuinely interested in how they used delegation do you think that asking that question made you sound like a solid developer? did you get an offer from Lyft eventually? I'd probably ask these questions after I get an offer. Maybe. Or maybe not. Who knows what works best IMHO
Like I mention in the video, the questions you ask are very personal to you based on what you are looking for in a position. For example, I always ask about Objective-C vs. Swift because I flat out don't want to spend my days writing objective-c. I enjoy Swift, so that factor is important to me. If a company is 100% objective c with no plans to convert to Swift, then the interview is over from my end. Remember, you are interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing you. It's important to find a fit that you'll enjoy, and not take any old job offer. That's a recipe for being unhappy at your job. As for not asking certain questions for fear of being seen as not a solid developer... I disagree with that a bit. I believe in being genuine. Any smart dev knows that it's impossible to know everything in this space, especially the details of how various projects are structured (like Lyft's protocol extensions over subclassing - it wasn't delegation that i asked about).
thanks Sean! appreciate the response. you're totally right actually. I was trying to figure out what went wrong with your interviews. Probably little knowledge of testing as you mentioned? IDK I'm also trying to figure out what they look for in iOS Engineers. You seem to be talented and I still don't get why you don't get hired (is it so difficult to get hired in the valley? are they looking for CS people?). Honestly I have no idea
Truthfully, at that time (this was at the beginning of 2017) I wasn't ready for the positions I was interviewing for. To put it simply... I was taking a shot at the major companies before I was fully ready, and it didn't work out. Over the course of 2017, between working on around 7 contracts as well as building this UA-cam channel, I improved 10 fold as a developer. Getting rejected at the beginning of 2017 is what cause me to get my ass in gear and get better. It was a humbling wake up call.
I'd also ask to get a tour of the workplace. This way I can see the type of people working and see their faces and initial reactions. I personally am not a huge fan of places with alot of old people. I need a majority of people to be between 20-35 and have diversity!
Hey Sean, Thanks for all your valuable content ,I'm a beginner here @youtube ,I would highly appreciate if you could share any of my youtube video tutorial on social media .It would help a ton !
You didn't watch the video, did you? The video is about what to ask your interviewer when they ask you "Do you have any questions for me?". This isn't "How to conduct an iOS interview".
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Watch Next - iOS Take Home Project - Job Interview Practice - Free Preview - ua-cam.com/video/MSIe2y6Fee8/v-deo.html
Watched the entire playlist today. Got an interview in a few hours. So fuxkin hype. Btw, the beard gains are outrageous fam.
How'd the interview go?
Sean Allen I actually smashed it. On to the next round. Got two more interviews today.
JayDee Any update? What kind of information did they ask you
Hey Sean, great video once again. My questions are: 1 What do you hope to gain or accomplish by adding a new engineer to your team. 2 What are a few of the most important qualities you would like to see in a new teammate.
I like these ones Harold. Always good to know why they are hiring, and what they hope to gain from it.
Sounds like some good questions to ask, Sean!
Some questions I’ve asked are:
- What about this company/team has kept you here for so long (if they’ve been with company for a while)?
- Can you tell me an opportunity for improvement in the team that I can focus on helping once I join the team?
- Where do you see this team in the next 5 years (as in growth, changes, etc)?
Good questions, Jason. I like the one asking about what aspects of the team needs improvement that you can help with. That's a good one.
0:18 That's me until I realized I should've prepared some questions.
Did this too many times and tried to ask the dumbest question you could ever hear because I had to think fast... Thank you for the video and the series!
You're always thinking of everything!
I can't take credit for this one... Someone in one of my live streams gave me the idea. Thanks whoever that was!
Can I write write down the question and read my questions to not forget ?
I've done that before.
Sean Allen I meant front of my interviewer. Anyway I did it today and at then end he appreciate that I bring my questions on a paper. It proves that you care about the job and are serious about the role.
I love asking “what makes your company tick” or “On a day to day who do you interact with” depending on who the call/interview is with
I recently had the opportunity to interview with a principal engineer at a large web company who mentioned he had been there for 5 years and had seen a lot of change in his time there. At the end of the interview I asked him what were the most interesting and profound changes he had seen during his time there, which led to a fantastic discussion about tech stacks and productivity, interoperability between teams, migration to services as the team grew, changes to team dynamics, and more. So if the interviewer has been there for a while, I'd ask what things have changed, and what has improved as a result of it. This shows forward thinking on your part, and really challenges the interviewer to reflect on the company, which subsequently lets you have a discussion about how you have grown yourself, and how you learn and adapt.
Very good insight, here. How long your interviewer has worked there can unlock a lot of good information.
Hey Sean, thanks for this video. My two questions usually are the two first that you point. 1. Swift or obj-c and from this one will bring branches of other questions that you talked about. 2. Storyboard or code and from this one refers the team, size and levels, the management, procedures, merge conflicts solutions if there is storyboard and code politics. I guess I can squeeze there about the environment. I had interviewed with regular tech companies and finance banking and they are different environments on refers to engineers. Sample: dresses code.
Sounds like we ask some similar questions, Patrick.
Patrick Sam with kaki
Hey Sean! Just subbed but really like your videos and I am in the stage of searching for an iOS job. Sadly the market in norway is really bad but ill manage. Really like these types of videos, alot of good questions i havent thought about but are really important to me. Keep going strong!
One thing I've been asking during phone screens which helps get me to the next round is "What does success look like for your engineers and how do you measure that?" They're always quite impressed and some interviewers even get stumped on what the answer is.
That's a great question as well. Thanks for sharing!
Great video Sean. Even here from Brazil, the reality and the questions are very similar.
Happy to hear the video is helpful, Gerson 😀
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Good like keep Bush Liao budala lahwy klso
Hi Sean,
I’m trying to find a solution for a question that was asked in one of my interviews. The question was if the user need to scroll through thousands of links that have images and labels in an iOS app how we can make our app performs better like smooth scrolling. As per my knowledge I answered that we can load JSON data asynchronously on the background thread and load the UI on the main thread. Furthermore, instead of accessing the web server again and again we can use NSCahe lazy loading to scrolling smooth. But It works only for a few images or small data not for thousands of links. Interviewer asked me that my solution works only for a couple of links what if user need to scroll through a thousand links?
Please give me your insight .
Thanks for your time.
I'm not sure what the interviewer was looking for, but in this situation, I'd likely make the network call to only load like 25 at a time... once the user gets to the bottom of the list, make another network call to pull in the next 25. (25 is an arbitrary number... can be whatever is a quick download). You'll see this method used in apps like instagram and twitter once you get to the end of the loaded posts.
@@seanallen Thanks Sean
Thanks for making this video! I like to ask if the team follows an Agile methodology, and if not, what development process do they follow.
How do companies who use storyboards avoid merge conflict with teams?
They do not. It's a headache and they deal with that. That's why companies who are serious about their product do not use Storyboards
One of the most common ways is to break down your app into multiple storyboards. This is subjective, but once I start to get more than 3 View Controllers in a storyboard, I start to think about how I can separate some VCs out into their own storyboard. So, the typical answer is to use MANY storyboards and keep things separated. I disagree with Simranpreet's comment. There are plenty of serious companies here in Silicon Valley that are using storyboards. Lyft is a pretty big one.
thanks for the answer sean
New answer would be "swiftui"
Hey, Sean, if you're considering getting into backend development as well, what technologies would you be looking at? The Swift-based Kitura/Vapor frameworks or something more stable like Python or Java frameworks?
As always, thanks for the great advice!
I haven't fully figured this one out yet. I'll probably learn using a non-swift language... this way if server side Swift every does catch on, there won't be as much to learn since I'll already know Swift.
My fav questions to ask:
"What's been your least favorite period here?"
"What do you most dislike about working here?"
"What is the process for ideation to shipping?"
"How does the company/team recover from a wreck?"
"Has the team ever done a death-march"?
I like these... I like the idea of asking about the "bad" stuff. I gotta ask tho... what do you mean by "death-march"? I haven't heard that term as it relates to software development. Maybe it means killing off a feature?
I would ask what architecture they are using in iOS apps.
can be asked the end user of the application which I am going to developed?
Hey Sean ,can you tell me how uber has those cars going around the map ? Any links would be helpful
well each car has a device which send the co-ordinates of the car to the server and with the help of these co-ordinates the map-pins has been pointed on the map and that API is called again again and which plots the pins(cars) on the map which make them feel like they are moving.
What are some questions you always ask?
Sean Allen To upload an app on app store do i need to pay 99$ per year?
Yup. If you want your app on the app store, you have to pay the developer fee.
Thanks
The question I always ask is "What technologies they are using at the backend.. the API's and all that stuffs" and one thing that i love to ask is about the "skill development" what are the TL or VP does to improve the skill's of the programer, through pushing the developer to think out of the box and make something productive out of it. And if I give interview to the Product Based company I always ask what pod's and third party library they are using. If any , what would they do if that library/pod got deprecated or get closed in future. because I have seen may product based companies which don't use any third party library in there project... BTW I find this video very helpful Thanks.
Happy to hear you found the video helpful, Shivam! I like the question about 3rd party libraries. I ask that one sometimes too.
Hey sean! I was thinking if you could do a UILocalizedIndexedCollation tutorial with contacts ?
I figured it out Sean! Finally!
Hey Sean, if you were back in college or even high school trying to network with Software Engineers, what questions would you ask them?
Answered via twitter 😎
You're awesome, thank you!
How brutal are these interview for JR. Developer's? Thats really all that I fear because I don't wanna be asked a question that I don't know or sit there looking bad for not being able to answer a question. Have you ever encountered a situation where an interviewer asks you questions that you do not know of? Exactly how much swift or OBCJ knowledge are they expecting us to have? Ive done some of the coding challenges at this point and for me they weren't exactly easy tasks to complete.
I like this series, it's good. I"ve been writing code for a long time, some high performance, cluster number crunching, opencl, openmp and I've never, ever had to use one of those interview alogrithms. Use a binary search on a cluster? a fibanicci sequence on a GPU? Uhm no. It's about things like inverting and solving massive covariance matrices. Using the GPU pipeline to crunch massive amount of 3D data in real-time.
So I've never had to use this basic stuff but I do appreciate very much the heads up on what the interviewers are looking for. Big Thanks.
Agreed... Most whiteboard questions aren't relevant to day to day iOS development. But, most companies ask those types of questions, so you gotta play the game (if you are interested in one of those types of jobs, that is).
I guess I just don't "get it" why they ask those questions. I recently had an interview where they asked about recurrsion, my reply was what is the context? Is this to run on AWS searching a big database? run this on a GPU pipeline? ?? I guess they didn't like my answer, I didn't get the position. So I'm watching your videos :-)
I think asking these questions may turn off the companies a little bit in the sense that you asking if a company uses a particular language or technology may sound like you are not willing to put in the work to learn new things (obviously not saying this is the case with you). You may probably ask these questions after you get an offer in hand. I think a company would much rather give an offer to someone who can be fresh out of college and hungry for interesting work (and doesn’t care about swift/obj-c or code/storyboards) rather that someone who asks these kind of questions at the first stage of the interview process (and treats some of these questions as deal breakers). Just my 2 cents
Of course every company is going to be different. And every developer is different. What questions to ask is very situational, which is why these are some suggestions and not a comprehensive list. Not that it’s wrong, but I think your point of view comes from someone trying to get “any” job. Some developers may have options, so they are looking for a very specific tech stack or technical environment. Again, I’m not saying you’re wrong, just pointing out that different devs will have different motives and desires. It’s a very nuanced topic.
Great stuff, thank you Sean!
I feel like (at least in my experience) asking certain questions (if the codebase is in objc/swift or coding programmatically/Storyboard), while these may certainly ease you in the company IF you get an offer, they also weaken your performance and may make you sound weak (newbie iOS dev because it sounds like you barely have worked with obj-c). IMHO. You asked Lyft engineers about delegation - even if you were genuinely interested in how they used delegation do you think that asking that question made you sound like a solid developer? did you get an offer from Lyft eventually? I'd probably ask these questions after I get an offer. Maybe. Or maybe not. Who knows what works best IMHO
Like I mention in the video, the questions you ask are very personal to you based on what you are looking for in a position. For example, I always ask about Objective-C vs. Swift because I flat out don't want to spend my days writing objective-c. I enjoy Swift, so that factor is important to me. If a company is 100% objective c with no plans to convert to Swift, then the interview is over from my end. Remember, you are interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing you. It's important to find a fit that you'll enjoy, and not take any old job offer. That's a recipe for being unhappy at your job. As for not asking certain questions for fear of being seen as not a solid developer... I disagree with that a bit. I believe in being genuine. Any smart dev knows that it's impossible to know everything in this space, especially the details of how various projects are structured (like Lyft's protocol extensions over subclassing - it wasn't delegation that i asked about).
thanks Sean! appreciate the response. you're totally right actually. I was trying to figure out what went wrong with your interviews. Probably little knowledge of testing as you mentioned? IDK I'm also trying to figure out what they look for in iOS Engineers. You seem to be talented and I still don't get why you don't get hired (is it so difficult to get hired in the valley? are they looking for CS people?). Honestly I have no idea
Truthfully, at that time (this was at the beginning of 2017) I wasn't ready for the positions I was interviewing for. To put it simply... I was taking a shot at the major companies before I was fully ready, and it didn't work out. Over the course of 2017, between working on around 7 contracts as well as building this UA-cam channel, I improved 10 fold as a developer. Getting rejected at the beginning of 2017 is what cause me to get my ass in gear and get better. It was a humbling wake up call.
Sean Allen honestly this makes a lot of sense. Thanks so much for taking the time to reply Sean! I can’t wait for new vids to be up :)
I'd also ask to get a tour of the workplace. This way I can see the type of people working and see their faces and initial reactions. I personally am not a huge fan of places with alot of old people. I need a majority of people to be between 20-35 and have diversity!
Interesting point. I like it 😀
diversity would include old people!
Hi Sean,
Great video.
Did you make the Lyft app ?
Nope. I've never worked at Lyft.
Sean++
Hey Sean, Thanks for all your valuable content ,I'm a beginner here @youtube ,I would highly appreciate if you could share any of my youtube video tutorial on social media .It would help a ton !
OMG guy who did 3 years of development doing interviews...
You didn't watch the video, did you? The video is about what to ask your interviewer when they ask you "Do you have any questions for me?". This isn't "How to conduct an iOS interview".