When it comes to interviewing for engineering jobs, Ulupreneur Aline Lerner knows the formula. A former engineer, Aline founded interviewing.io, a platform that enables software engineers to practice technical interviewing anonymously. Ten years ago after the publication of Cracking the Coding Interview; she and her co-authors have written Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview. We spoke to Aline about why it’s critical for engineers to update and revamp their interviewing skills in ways they never imagined to navigate this tough job market.
What’s different about today’s job market for software engineers?
The bar is much higher than it’s ever been. It’s 20% higher than in 2020, so interviewers have higher standards. We know that because we can look at what it takes to pass an interview today versus what it took to pass an interview then.
There’s more competition and fewer jobs. It’s probably the first time there’s been a down market for engineers since 2000.
That means applicants have to hone their skills in areas they never needed to before, and some of those areas may seem very foreign to them.”
We wanted to inform people about how different the interviewing process is these days and how to sharpen their skills.
The first Cracking the Coding Interview was largely a collection of problems and solutions, but this book is much more conceptual.
What are some of the new skills people need to hone in their job searches?
In the book, we are trying to teach people how to think differently and be equipped for whatever challenges get thrown at them. People need to re-think how they get in the door. Forget about your resume and how you look on paper; with employers’ increasing dependence on AI, applying in the traditional sense doesn’t really work anymore. You need to be strategic about selling yourself. Of course, it always helps if you know people who can get you in the door.
People need to understand how hiring works behind the scenes: what companies are thinking, what recruiters are thinking, and how market forces determine some of the behaviors that they see from companies.
A big part of a job search is setting aside time to do outreach, the kind of outreach where you find hiring managers, figure out what to say to them, write something personal—write something short and succinct, but very compelling. That’s a very different style of job searching than what worked in years past. So, the implications are that we have to know how to do that and how to write things that actually get responses. We have templates to help people do this type of outreach.
How have the interviews changed?
Companies have become increasingly used to candidates solving a problem perfectly. And not just solving the problem, but showing their thought process and making good progress from start to finish.
With the online component of this book, we are able to provide readers with interview replays; they can actually listen to real people solving exactly the kinds of questions that they would get.”
Those interviews reside on interviewing.io. This multimedia component gives people the opportunity to realize, “Oh, that’s what a great interview sounds like” or “That’s what a mediocre interview sounds like.” We also have an AI interviewer that can ask any question in the book.
We also have cool snippets that users can copy and paste to help in most hiring interviews. If a recruiter wants your compensation history, for example, this is what you say. We give advice on how to deliver the right signal to interviewers and avoid the mistakes that even great engineers make.
We thought about writing something in the book about what we think the future is going to look like—and then we talked ourselves out of it because we inevitably are going to be wrong. I do think there are going to be some serious changes to how engineers work and how they’re interviewed. There is going to be more of a push for people who understand how things work and who aren’t just delivering code—people who deeply understand technology and the architecture.
