IT Job Interview

Job Winner’s Strategy to Answering Interview Questions

Experts cannot be wrong. Human Resources personnel, professional recruiters and various other career experts all agree: one of the best ways to prepare yourself for a job interview is to anticipate questions, develop your answers, and practice, practice, practice.

This website provides lists of popular IT job interview questions, and more importantly, the winning answers. Knowing the types of questions to expect can be very useful. But knowing how to answer those questions can mean the difference between getting the job and getting the “reject letter.”

Here’s the recommended strategy to help you win the job interview:

1. List your best selling points for the position. What qualifications, skills, experience, knowledge, background, personality traits do you possess that would apply to this job? Write them down and look for opportunities to work them into your answers.

2. List probable questions for this position. You should develop your own list of probable questions based specifically on the job for which you are applying. Put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes… what kinds of questions would you ask to find the best person for this job?

3. Prepare your answers to likely questions. Review and edit them until you feel they are “just right.” Read them over and over until you are comfortable that you know them fairly well. Don’t try to memorize them; don’t worry about remembering every word. Practice saying them out loud. If possible, have a friend help you rehearse for the interview.

4. Prepare key phrases for the interview. If you’ve got a copy of the job announcement for the position you’ll be interviewing for, study that carefully. Note the phrases they use when describing the desired qualifications. You’ll want to target these as much as possible when developing your answers and during the interview conversation. For example, if the announcement says they want someone with “strong database administration skills,” make sure you include “strong database administration skills” in at least one of your answers. Prepare a sentence like “I have strong DBA skills and in have administratered large scale database server for both Oracle and DB2.”

5. Don’t use canned answers. It is very important that you customize your interview question answers as much as possible even though you can find many well crafted answers from this website. Interviewers can spot “canned” answers a mile away, and if they suspect you are regurgitating answers that are not your own, you can kiss that job goodbye. You must apply your own experiences, personality and style to answer the questions in your own way. This is crucial, and it will give you a big advantage over candidates who simply recite answers they’ve read in a book or website.

In general, if you prepare well, you have much better chance to win the job. However, you should be aware of the important facts out of your control: There is no way to predict every question you will be asked during a job interview. In other words, expect unexpected questions–they’ll come up no matter how much preparation you do.

Are you afraid of interview? Don’t! Job interview questions are not things to fear, they are opportunities to excel. They allow you to show why you are the best person for the job, so
instead of dreading them, look forward to them! The key is to give better answers than anyone else, and win the job offer.

Interview Questions for Programmer Analyst

A state agency interviewed Staff Programmer Analyst candidates with the following questions. Staff programmer analyst is the middle level position for programming / developer job classification. Usually each classification has 3 levels, - associate, staff, and senior.

1. Please tell us how your education and experience are prepared for this position?

2. What methodologies have you used for software development lifecycle?

3. Please describe the most challenging project you have worked.

4. What is your experience as a team leader?

5. How do you advance your knowledge in information technologies?

As always, after these five core questions have gone through, the interviewer asked, “Do you have questions for us?”. Then at last, “Do you have last comment?”.

Since there is no detailed technical information asked, these questions should not be too hard to answer. Can you answer them?

How to Respond to Odd Interview Questions

Sometimes interviews do ask odd, inappropriate, or even illegal interview question like:

“How old are you?”
“Are you married?”
“Do you have children?”
“Do you have a stable personal life?”

These questions are not related to the job for which you are applying, but they do have a purpose to ask, they want to figure out something on you. So that it’s up to you to figure out and address their true concern.

For example, when an interviewer asks “Do you have a stable personal life?”, he or she is trying to protect the company from a bad situation that they’ve had to deal with in the past, such as an former employee’s personal problems interfered with the person’s ability to do the job. In this case the interviewer really wants to know is, will you be a reliable employee who can be counted upon to show up and do your job effectively, regardless of any personal problems you may have.

You have several choices to address odd interview questions:

You can simply say, “You can’t ask me that! It’s an inappropriate question!” then You have little chance to get job. So don’t this.

A smart choice to answer the question. Even if it’s wrong to ask, there’s nothing wrong with answering it. You should realize that answering personal questions may harm your chance of getting the job if what you are giving is not what they want to answer, but that is not worse than not answering the question.

For questions about your personal life, you can just give the positive aspects no matter what happened before. For instance, to answer “Do you have a stable personal life?”, say something like:

“Yes, I have a very stable personal life and I don’t foresee any changes in that regard. My career is important to me and my family is very supportive. There won’t be any
distractions affecting my work performance.”

An alternative to this type of questions is to ask a question back, ask for clarifying their concerns:

“How would my answer to that question directly relate to my ability to perform in this position?”

“Could you please rephrase or elaborate on your question? I want to make sure I address your concern.”

What is Your Greatest Weakness?

Here’s what career experts would often suggest, — answering the question with a positive trait disguised as a weakness, for example:

“I work too hard.”
“I’m a perfectionist.”
“I am workaholic.”

But that’s not what interviewers want to hear. They want you to tell your real weakness. They are smart enough to see the trick. So, a good answer is to tell your true weakness.

IT is a huge field; most IT pros could be strong on certain areas but weak on others. What you can do is to pick up an area which is a non-key element of the position as a weakness. If it is a DBA job, you may say your weakness is lack of project management experience. If you are applying for a programmer job, your weakness could be less experience on network administration. Just pick a neutral weakness about something that’s not critical to the job, then you should be fine.

After telling your weakness, explain what you’ve done to overcome the weakness, which shows that you are actively seeking ways to improve yourself. Through this approach, you present yourself as a reasonable, honest person who recognizes areas that need to grow.

The following answer is for a Java programmer position:

“Although I have extensive experience in Java programming, I am relatively weak in network administration. Couple of times in my previous job I had to get help from the network team to setup networked QA test environment. I wish I could do it by myself, so I’ve spent spare time to grab some hands-on network skills. I’ll continue building experience in network area as network skills become more important to programmers in today’s enterprise computing environment.”

Based on your experience, please describe 3 factors that are the most critical to the success of an IT project?

This is an open question. My answer would focus on management, people, and technology.

“To me the first critical factor is the management support. Without a strong executive sponsorship, a project could not start and go on. I would make sure the management team understand the scope and purpose of the project, and have reasonable expectations. During the project I would communicate with the management effectively and keep them updated. The second factor is the team building. I would build a strong team with different skills and experience that could handle different tasks in each phase of the development. The third factor is the technology. We need to do a lot of research and analysis to select the right technology suitable for the project. Depending on the type of project, we may need to evaluate development tools, middle tier software, database servers, and hardware. There are many factors to consider. Let me know if you want me to go in details on this topic.”

How Do You Resolve Disputes And Handle Conflicts With Coworkers?

Are you responsible, mature, and capable of handling conflicts in the work? If so, you may get the job. So answer what your employer wants to hear. Tell a story about a dispute or conflict you had with a co-worker and how you resolved it in a positive way.

Don’t say you are so good with people and never have to handle conflicts. They don’t believe you.

Sample Answer:

“In dealing with conflicts or disagreements, I always listen carefully and try to understand my coworker’s perspective. It’s important to remain calm, which prevents arguments from escalating. Keeping an open mind, I present my side of the issue and listen to my coworker’s side. Usually we can come up with a compromise that we both agree on. If this doesn’t work I will suggest we get a third opinion, either from another coworker or the boss, to help resolve the issue. In my last job a coworker and I disagreed on the best way to create a automatic data migration procedure for our interface process. She wanted to acquire an expensive commercial software package; I wanted to develop a customized in-house scripting program which is a much cheaper. There were pros and cons to both, which we wrote down and discussed. In the end, we agreed on implementing a free open source data migration application with a little customized scripting configuration, which save us money and meet our need very well.”

What Database Design Experience Do You Have?

Database design questions is always asked in job interviews for DBAs, database analysts, and database developers. To make interviewers happy, your answer must cover all phases of database design: analysis of business entities, data modeling, build ERD, logical database design, and physical database design. You may also mention the scope of the database, such as number of entities and tables, the size of database, etc. and tell what database design tools you have used.

Suggested answer:

“I have 6 years of database design experience mainly with Oracle database and have been involved in over 10 database design projects. In these projects I’ve worked on analysis of business entities and data modeling, creating entity relationship diagrams, design the logical database such as converting entities and attributes into table and columns. I also worked a lot on designing the physical database such as analyzing storage usage and performance, designing tablespace and table partition, writing SQL scripts to create database objects like tables, views, and indexes. One of the databases I designed is for a Federal agency’s employee activity tracking system; it contains over 200 tables, about 50 views, and more than 150 indexes on an Oracle server in UNIX platform. I used Oracle Designer to assist most of my database design tasks.”

How to Handle the Tough Interview Questions

Q. How do you handle stress?

Notice how this question is subtly different to “can you handle stress?” Reply with: “I break my work down into smaller steps and work through those steps rather than get worked up over the bigger picture.”

Or: “I tend to see problems arising before they become too large to handle and I make contingencies to cover them.”

Q. How long have you been looking for work/another position?

If you’ve been unemployed for a while obviously the employer is going to think… “Why didn’t anyone want them in all that time. If they were any good they’d already have found a job by now.”

An important point: businesses are fuelled by innovation and solving customer’s needs and problems. They’re not fuelled by the amount of hours their employees work.

You’re not there to work 40 hours a week. You are there to reach and attain certain goals. So, your best answer to the question is along the lines of… “I don’t want just any old job. I’ve been using my days researching companies I’d most like to work for and where I feel I could grow and develop my skills and be a key member in the company’s success. I’ve also been studying and reading to give myself more skills to add more value to my chosen career.”

You could go on to explain that you knew this would go against you because of the length of time you were out of work, but you realized that your whole future relied on what you did now and you were willing to take that risk.

Q. Have you ever been fired?

Try to answer “NO.”

If you have been and are asked about it, explain why, and what you learned from the experience. If other people were fired with you or resigned because of a change in management, then explain that as well.

Q. In your last position what duties did you perform?

This question is to see whether you are goal or task oriented.

Tell them what you did and what it meant to the company: “Part of my job involved typing letters to customers to nurture them. This involved establishing an intimate knowledge of our customers needs. It also took up a lot of time but I got around this by establishing a clever database for merging that sped up the process significantly.”

This shows you are goal oriented… that you believe in getting the job done and not just in being busy. Task oriented people believe in simply being busy. Employers want goal-oriented people.

Q. Can we check your references?

This question is often asked to put you off guard. This is especially true if you come across as being too perfect, or too smooth.

If you already have a job and are considering changing tell the interviewer they can check your references if you receive a firm job offer as you want to keep matters confidential at the moment.

If they want to check your present employer for a reference, make sure they give you a written job offer first. The last thing you want is to miss out on this job and arrive back at work and have your present employer find ways to dismiss you for lack of loyalty.

Q. Tell me about yourself?

Make sure you answer this question in a way that benefits the employer. They are looking for honesty, integrity, being a team player, punctuality and goal orientated people. If you are going to talk about anything don’t ramble on and on - talk about one of the subjects I’ve just shown you.

You can always ask: “What area of my background are you most interested in?” Their response allows you to tell them what they want to hear.

Q. Why do you feel you are a better ……………… than the other applicants?

This is not the time to put down other people nor is it the time to brag about how great you are.

You have a few options. The first is to say something along the lines like “to many people, being a ………………… is just a job. To me it’s something I’ve always wanted to be. Being a ……………. is more than a job to me - it’s a passion and that passion comes through in my work.”

The other option is to say you never worried about being better than the rest. You’ve only considered being the best you can be. Go on to tell them you think these skills are the most valuable for the position and then show them how you use these skills to be incredibly productive and a great team member.

by Acland Brierty

SHAMELESS PLUG: Job Secrets Revealed comes with a special ‘interview secrets’ report that will give you - more secrets of the experts including sections on “behavioral interviewing”, an expanded section on understanding the mind of the employer and the Top 10 list of the “Things Interviewers Fear,” as well as the complete list of the toughest interview questions you’ll ever get, including advice on how to side-step the ones you won’t want to answer. Plus, we give you powerful techniques to let you take control of the interview.

Can You Lie in Job Interview?

First, let’s admit the fact, many job seekers lie in interview, and they get good jobs with no problem. Sounds like a good deal? It might be, but the risk is not tiny. After all, lying is not a good practice. Thus my suggestion is, do not lie. Instead, hide facts. Facts are the truth, but you don’t have to tell the truth if the facts don’t make any good to you. Last but not least, don’t lie on obvious things, that means, don’t call black white.

It’s sometimes very tempting to “alter” the truth a bit during a job interview. For instance, say you quit instead of being fired. That might be OK, because how you had been let go is a blurred area. But by all means you cannot say you get M.S. degree in Computer Science from Stanford if you never had, that’s a very obvious lie. thus the risk of being discovered as a liar far outweighs the potential benefit of hiding the truth.

If you are thinking about telling a lie during the interview, ask yourself these questions (this technique has helped me make many major decisions): “What is the best thing that could happen? What is the worst thing that could happen? Is the best thing worth risking the worst thing?” In this instance, the best thing would be getting the job. The worst thing would be getting discovered as a liar, which could lead to getting fired, which could lead to unemployment, which could lead to more job searching, which could lead to another interview, which could lead to the stress of deciding whether to lie about just getting fired, and so on… a cycle that can go on indefinitely. Is all that worth getting the one job, perhaps on a temporary basis?

Always consider the consequences of your actions.

IT and Computer Skills for Career Success in Information Technology

IT professionals constantly acquire and enhance technical skills to achieve career success in information technology. How much you worth and how much you make are dependent on the value of your skills in the industry. One of proven strategies for IT career success is to develop top level skills.

IT industry is huge and skills are many. Generally speaking, IT skills may be developed in the following areas:

• Programming skills
• Database skills
• System and network skills
• Architecture Design skills
• Integration and COTS skills

Programming Skills

Programming skills are essential to IT career success. Many of us stated IT career from programming jobs. Programming skills are about coding computer programs using a computer language. Some of widely used computer languages are Java, C/C++, Visual Basic (VB), C#, and Pascal (Delphi).  Newer languages like Ruby and Python are getting hotter nowadays.
Database Skills

Database skills are so important. No mater what’s your focus in IT career, you got to have some database skills in order to stand tall in IT industry. Database skills include data modeling, database design, database analysis, data warehousing, and database administration. Your database skills should be built on the leading database technologies - Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Sybase.

System and Network Skills

System and network skills are about designing, installing, configuring, and managing operating systems in a networking environment. The network configurations could be LAN (local area network), WAN (wide area network), or wireless. The most common operating systems are UNIX, Windows, and Linux.  System and network security is a hot sub-area worth your investoment of time and effort.
Architecture Design Skills

Software system architecture designs are high level skills in IT career. While programming jobs are moving to offshore, system architecture design professionals will stay in America. To make your IT career secure, you should acquire more skills in system architecture design. Currently most software system architectures are designed on two leading platforms, - J2EE and .NET.

Integration and COTS skills

Integration and COTS skills are specialized and very valuable. These skills are about mastering one of COTS (commercial off the shelf) software packages that could be ERP, CRM, PLM, or enterprise asset management system. Systems from different vendors or running on different platforms are often needed to work together, that’s where system integration skills apply.

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