Vp software engineering interview questions

Tell me about the diversity of your team. What do you do ensure you have diversity? How do you recruit and hire in SF Bay Area because it is so hard and competitive? How much time do you spend hiring and sourcing candidates?

What do you do? How do you work with your recruiters? Working with Tech Leads and Technology What is the role of a tech lead? What is the relationship between the engineering manager and tech lead? What if no one on your team wants to be a tech lead, or do the things tech leads do? How do you grow and develop tech leads? Have you ever disagreed with one of your tech leads?

How do you ensure code quality and keep a lid on tech debt? How do you establish ownership in your teams? Prioritization and Execution How do you manage multiple requests to your team? How do you deal with competing priorities? Did you ever disagree with your product manager about the priority of tasks or if something needed to be done at all? How do you see the tradeoffs between scope, quality, and schedule? How do you work with product managers, UX team, etc.? Tell me about a project you are most proud of.

Tell me about a time you exceeded expectations and went above and beyond. Tell me a time when a project you were responsible for was late or not meeting expectations. What did you do?

Tell me a mistake you made that hurt the business. What was your biggest failure? What are you not good at? Explain to me the roles and responsibilities in a Scrum team. This company was very into Agile and Scrum. Conflicts Tell me a time you had a conflict with another manager and how you resolved it. Tell me about a time you did not see eye to eye with your manager and how you resolved it.

Tell me about a time there was a conflict between members of your team and how you resolved it. New Questions Since this List was First Published What is the hardest lesson you have learned as an engineering manager? What would you say is the main responsibility or most important thing for an engineering manager to do? Tell me about a project that did NOT go as planned and what you learned from it.

What is an area you are working on improving? How have you grown as a manager over the last year? Tell me when you took a risk hiring someone and how it worked out. How do you measure your success? How do you describe your job to people outside the industry? How do you build a team? How do you keep people motivated?

What is the point of a ? Strengths, areas for development, etc. How would you assess if someone is a good manager? Why is management attractive to you? What in your mind are the responsibilities of a manager? What kind of process have you followed in the past and what has worked well for you?

How do you institute the right process at the right time? How do you know when you need something more formal? Have they ever removed process?

Why or why not? What are you looking for in an engineer when you recruit? Do they prefer to hire only experienced folks? Are they more comfortable with generalists or specialists? How have you optimized the recruiting process in the past? Have they thought about the recruiting funnel and how you can optimize different parts of it?

What are their thoughts on structured interview loops vs. How do you deal with people performance issues? Have you ever had to implement a PIP performance improvement plan? How do you prioritize all of your responsibilities as a director of engineering? How do you define the role of a director of engineering? What is one of the most successful engineering projects you've worked on? Describe a time when one of your reports disagreed with you. What did you do? Is there anything you would change about how you performed in your most recent engineering job?

Tell me about a large engineering task or project you completed in your previous role. How did you accomplish it? Here are some sample answers to questions the hiring manager may ask you during your interview for a director of engineering role:.

An interviewer may ask this question to determine whether you can provide clear, concise instructions to your team. Being able to communicate effectively can help you ensure everyone understands what tasks they are responsible for. Example: "I use agile project management tools to visually track my team's progress and delegate tasks so that everyone can see what needs to be done in each phase of a project.

I also strive to build rapport with each of my team members and encourage them to express their ideas. I believe actively listening to team members improves my performance as a director of engineering and results in better quality projects.

A director of engineering must pay close attention to their team's performance to ensure projects are completed on schedule. An interviewer may ask this question to determine how comfortable you are delivering direct feedback to employees. Example: "Through my previous management experiences, I've learned that every situation is unique. I would start by addressing my concerns with the employee one on one while showing compassion and trying to understand what the root cause of the issue is.

Often, the best thing a director of engineering can do is show their team members support. If the employee shares why they have been underperforming, I can help coach them to improve their performance. However, if they continue to underperform after several conversations or if their performance is having a negative impact on the team, I may have to consider replacing them. Even the most talented directors of engineering make mistakes sometimes.

An interviewer may ask this question to understand how you recover from making a mistake and what you've learned from these experiences. Example: "When I was just starting out in my engineering career, I worked on a large project with 12 other people. We had a short amount of time to complete the project, and the first couple of days were very challenging because everyone was working in different areas. After the first day, it came to my attention that another engineer was working on the same task I was, so we essentially duplicated our efforts.

At first, I was frustrated because this meant we wasted time, but I later realized that we were both at fault for not communicating what part of the project we were working on with the rest of the team.

We both put in overtime to ensure the project was back on track, and I learned an important lesson about communicating with team members. Directors of engineering often work alongside other key stakeholders and leaders within a company who may have their own opinions about how projects, processes, or strategies should be approached.

A hiring manager may ask this question to assess your interpersonal and conflict resolution skills. Example: "While many people see conflict as a negative thing, I think it can be useful. Software requirements are functional description of proposed software system.

Requirements are assumed to be the description of target system, its functionalities and features. Requirements convey the expectations of users from the system.

It is a measure to assess how practical and beneficial the software project development will be for an organization. The software analyzer conducts a thorough study to understand economic, technical and operational feasibility of the project. Economic - Resource transportation, cost for training, cost of additional utilities and tools and overall estimation of costs and benefits of the project.

Technical - Is it possible to develop this system? Operational - Can the organization adjust smoothly to the changes done as per the demand of project? Is the problem worth solving? Requirements can be gathered from users via interviews, surveys, task analysis, brainstorming, domain analysis, prototyping, studying existing usable version of software, and by observation.

SRS or Software Requirement Specification is a document produced at the time of requirement gathering process. It can be also seen as a process of refining requirements and documenting them. Functional requirements are functional features and specifications expected by users from the proposed software product. Non-functional requirements are implicit and are related to security, performance, look and feel of user interface, interoperability, cost etc.

Software Measures can be understood as a process of quantifying and symbolizing various attributes and aspects of software. Software Metrics provide measures for various aspects of software process and software product. They are divided into —. Modularization is a technique to divide a software system into multiple discreet modules, which are expected to carry out task s independently. Concurrency is the tendency of events or actions to happen simultaneously.

In software, when two or more processes execute simultaneously, they are called concurrent processes. Concurrency, is implemented by splitting the software into multiple independent units of execution namely processes and threads, and executing them in parallel. Cohesion is a measure that defines the degree of intra-dependability among the elements of the module.

Coupling is a measure that defines the level of inter-dependability among modules of a program. Structured English is native English language used to write the structure of a program module by using programming language keywords, whereas, Pseudo Code is more close to programming language and uses native English language words or sentences to write parts of code.

Data dictionary is referred to as meta-data. Meaning, it is a repository of data about data. Data dictionary is used to organize the names and their references used in system such as objects and files along with their naming conventions. Structured design is a conceptualization of problem into several well-organized elements of solution. Function-oriented design is comprised of many smaller sub-systems known as functions.