Swift - What to Ask Them? - iOS Interview Questions

what's up everybody we're back with another video in my iOS interview question series and today we're talking about a pretty often overlooked aspect of the interview and no that's not some crazy Cody concept or some weird Swift question we're talking about at the end of the interview when the interviewer goes all right that's all the questions I got for you you got it in for me and you can't just be like like you have to happy you have questions ready and that's what we're gonna talk about today now before we dive in I want to talk about some overarching themes here that you're gonna hear me say you know repeatedly throughout but your questions need to be genuine and intelligent right the worst thing you can do is come up with some contrived super hard technical question that you just made up just to make yourself sound intelligent I mean the interviewers are gonna see right through that and it doesn't look good on you so definitely keep your questions again genuine intelligent and it should be stuff that you genuinely want to know and then second I want to talk about how I would love for this video to go so first of all I'm gonna give some very general questions because you know I hope this is obvious that when you're interviewing with a company you should do some very deep research on their product their company and ask questions specific to that obviously in this video I can't do that because I can't you know cover every single company in the world so just know that these questions are gonna be general i/os questions that I typically ask in every interview because there's some of the most important things that I want to know and then secondly I would love for this is not going to be an exhaustive list of questions so I would love for somebody that comes to this video for this to be a resource for them so first of all they get my video they get my opinion and then I will offer the comment section to just be filled with a bunch of questions suggestions or stuff that you've used in an interview that has worked out well or something you've used it hasn't worked out well so I would love for the comments section to be just as valuable as a video so if you've been through the interview process or if you think you have a great question to share please share in the comments we'd all love to hear them all right with that out of the way let's dive into the actual questions so we're gonna start with the the general questions first and one of the first things I always ask is that about their technology stack and mainly what I'm asking here is about objective-c or Swift and if they're they're both then I ask you know what percentage is objective-c versus Swift and do you have any future plans to convert that remaining Objective C to Swift and the reason I want to know this is because many of you may know this I've basically been writing Swift my whole career been doing this about three years I pretty much just punted Objective C so if a codebase is a hundred percent or mostly in Objective C with no future plans to switch over to Swift then I don't like I usually ask this question in the recruiter call which is the very first phase of the interview real quick if you don't know the interview phases it typically goes a quick half hour recruiter call that's not very technical and then a one-hour phone screen that is technical it's like over Skype and you do some live coding and then last but not least there is a the final interview that's like a four to six hour on-site interview where you're gonna meet with a bunch of different people it's a real quick overview and that is just generally how it goes so I asked this Swifter objective-c question typically in the recruiter call because if they're all objective-c like I just don't want to waste my time or their time and just kind of end it right there because I just my preference again I'm not bashing objective-c but I just don't want to spend my days writing Objective C I love Swift so that's something I want to know and get out of the way right away find out where they stand on the whole Swift or objective-c thing and it's and if they have like say they're 50% Swift 50% objective-c but they're actively working on converting Objective C to Swift that's perfectly fine for me too and the technology stack isn't necessarily just swifter objective-c I mean we're talking about their back-end as well how they do that and this kind of leads into my typical next question because I have aspirations on learning back-end web development so I like to ask and I'm very careful about how I asked this question and I'll tell you about that in a little bit but I like to ask if there's room for you know say an iOS developer to expand their knowledge into back-end web development and the reason I'm very careful about how I ask this question is because I'm obviously interviewing for an iOS position so I don't want to give the impression that I'm like not even interested in iOS I just want to learn back in web dev like why would you hire me as an iOS developer so again I'm very clear there's like no I'm here for an iOS developer but I'm just curious if there's the you know ability to spend like 2% of my time to you know expand my knowledge become a better overall developer learning the back-end web development with our back-end web developers and it because I believe and I can express this to them but I believe the more knowledgeable you are about the entire stack the better you can be at your specialty which in my case would be the iOS development so the ability to expand and learn to other avenues whether it's backing web development or dabbling in a little bit into the design I like to know if there's the ability it's not a deal-breaker if there's not the ability to kind of branch off but it is more attractive to me if I know that I could pick up some some web development skills at this position as well and then next up I always ask about the team the team is pretty much the most important thing that I look for when going to a new position that's cuz that's who you're gonna work with every day that's that can make or break how happy you are at your job and how much you can learn from so I always ask how big the team is and the variety of answers you get is obviously going to depend on what company you're going to write if this is a brand new startup you might be the team like might be a team of one and then also all the way up the spectrum you know to a larger startup you know maybe it's three or four to a huge company maybe it's in the hundreds so I always ask how big the team is just to get a feel for it and it's interesting so like you look at like lyft and uber as competitive's for competitors for example I don't know the exact numbers but I just know roughly but like let's say lyft is only like 20 to 30 iOS developers where uber is like a hundred one hundred and fifty so it's like even though you think companies are comparable they may be very different in their team sizes and again if somebody knows those actual numbers forgive me if they're way off but I know uber has a hell of a lot more than lyft so the next thing I ask is kind of the experience level spectrum of the team you know is the team made up of mostly junior guys just getting started or is there no junior guys everybody's senior or is there a good mix of people that you know this is their first developer job straight out of school or straight out of a bootcamp whatever to somebody that's been doing it 10 years and I like to know what happened this spectrum because I like to know like where I fit in what I'm looking for in a team and again this is on my job hunt coming up here in early 2018 is I'm looking for that spectrum of both right because I'm looking for the more knowledgeable person that I can just soak up that knowledge from but at the same time as you guys may have gathered from this YouTube channel I enjoy teaching so I would like to go somewhere where AI can suck up the knowledge from those you know more senior developers but I can also teach people as well people that are more junior than I am are or just getting started so that is the ideal team that I'm looking for again like I said this you may be looking for a different team team you know dining but that's just what I'm looking for but overall I think team dynamic whether that's the number of people in the team or their experience range is a very important question to ask when interviewing and then kind of building off the team I typically ask about growth within the position now again this is one of those questions that might not be meaningful to you but it's meaningful to me and that is the growth within the company so eventually I would like to see myself in management more specifically like an iOS team lead like leading a team of iOS developers on a project that's where I would like to see myself in the very near future so some companies like to promote from within and to keep that company culture other companies like to you know bring in fresh blood bring in a fresh manager and you know I'm not saying either way is right or wrong but I like to find out what that is because I if they and again this is not another make or break but it's more attractive to me if they promote from within because I foresee myself you know hopefully you know getting that promotion from within so that is a very important factor to me and another question I typically ask is I like to find out where the product is in its lifecycle and this the answer to this question is going to vary wildly depending on the company like if you're going to a very early-stage startup their product might not even exist yet you might be coming on to build the app from scratch to launch or you know moving up the spectrum a little bit maybe they've they've launched their MVP they've you know proved their concept now they want to bring in new developers to actually build the real thing that's a whole different face or if you know they've already launched their 1.0 and now they're looking to build their 1.1 features and do some bug fixes to clean up the 1.0 that's a whole another phase and then you got the the more mature app you know like a Facebook that's been around and you know the word about just kind of maintaining the codebase and you know fixing bugs keeping everything working smoothly for billions of users so there's again there's a spectrum and then each stop along the spectrum is like a completely different you know working atmosphere or should I say working atmosphere but what you're going to work on on that app and again I'm speaking in general so where that product is it's pretty important for me to know so I definitely always ask this question as well in the last general question I want to talk about and and let me just reiterate this is by no means an exhaustive list like I said there's usually a whole lot of like company or product specific questions I dive into but this is kind of just the ones that I typically always hit pretty much no matter the company so anyway not another way I always ask in is not a deal breaker but do you do your UI in code or in storyboard you guys know I'm team storyboard I prefer storyboard but I always just kind of like to know what I'm getting into and if they do use storyboard I like to ask what practices they use to avoid the common pitfalls of using storyboard in a larger team just to kind of make sure they know what they're doing is to be honest with you and then if they're if they do do it in code that's fine too like I said this isn't a deal-breaker but I just want to know what I'm getting into you know for example if it's in storyboard like I know like I got that I'm good to go if it's in cos done in code it's like okay I know I need to probably brush up on that a little bit before I would start but if I got hired so again it's more of I asked that question just to kind of know what I'm getting into all right now that the general questions are out of the way I'm going to give a tip here on what you can really do to really stand out and really kind of go above and beyond now this is geared towards the final interview remember I talked about the phases where you do the recruiter call the one our technical phone screen and then the final interview right so typically this final interview like I said is four to six hours long you're gonna meet with many people but your recruiter or whoever is kind of helping you through this process typically will give you a list of who you're interviewing with you know the day before or a couple days before and like a scheduled so this is your opportunity to go creep mode and I'm not talking and find out about their kids like don't go crazy but you know check their LinkedIn check their Twitter see if they have a blog see if they spoken at any conferences because it's very common especially at the larger companies that some of their developers will have given talks at conferences and this is where you kind of dive in and you know if they have a blog like start reading some other blog posts so you can have questions ready and again back to the beginning reiterate genuine intelligent questions that you really want to know that have shown that you've done your research let me give you an example of what I did at lift back in early 2017 or earlier this year so one of the programmers that lifts there I'm sorry iOS developers that lift did a talk on how they use protocols and protocols extensions very heavily in their app as opposed to like sub classing and this is something that I have not dealt with before in an app that kind of architecture so the talk was actually fascinating to me you know even without interviewing at lyft so I had questions ready about that topic and you could tell like that I came across and genuinely interested I wasn't like faking it and you tell I've done my research and I've researched up on how their app is you know architecture so architected that's the right way to say that so that's a great example of you know doing some research diving into a topic you know and again it doesn't have to be a talk it can be their blog if somebody's written a very interesting blog post you know come with that or I just kind of creep their Twitter feed see if you guys have any common interests that can be a good conversation starter it really will who've you to do the research on your interviewers you know before you go into this interview process and the last thing in this may be kind of common sense but if the app is available in the App Store download the app and do a deep dive into the app I'm talking look at every single screen look at it from a developer's point of view and a user's point of view but look at every single single screen even the settings screen even the most mundane things and try to find out like you know how they did it kind of try to reverse engineer in your mind and if you have questions during that process which you know if you're a developer you probably will should I call man how do they do that or I wonder if they did this that way you know so and so like for example lift like how did you get those little cars to go along the map without animation or whatever so you know just stuff like that just stuff that shows that you've done your research into the app you've thought about how they built it and then you have again a genuine intelligent question about that topic so that goes very far it seems like common sense but I've talked to a few interviewers and they feel like you'd be surprised how many people come in an interview and have not even downloaded the app never used it sounds ridiculous but I have heard that before so that is the last tip download the app do a deep dive kind of like take a like a scientific approach like try to dissect the app try to reverse-engineer the app and come up with a bunch of questions like that another good tip is to have suggestions on how you would improve things from a user's perspective and potentially from a developer's perspective be careful with this don't come at this like you're all-knowing you know come at this is like hey I was thinking about this this is kind of a way I thought you can improve this what do you think you know it just shows initiative and it shows you've really taken a deep dive into their app and you've done your research shows effort and initiative and they like to see that all right that's it those are the questions I typically ask again by no means was that exhaustive but I would love to hear what questions you have again I would love for this video to be a great resource for anybody wanting to know like hey what question should I ask in an interview all right if you found this at all useful go and hit subscribe I put out new videos all the time

Channel: Sean Allen

Views: 26,979

Keywords: Swift, Learn Swift, How To Learn Swift, iOS Interview Questions, iOS Developer Interview Questions, iOS Interview Questions and answers, iOS Developer, iOS Development, How to get a job as an iOS developer, iOS Contracting, iOS Freelancing, iOS App Development, Swift Tutorial, How to Learn iOS Development, Swift Interview Questions, Swift Interview Questions and Answers

Id: 8XqzE-7e1qk

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018