W04 Assignment: Conduct Technical Interviews
Overview
Purpose: Demonstrate your technical interviewing skills.
In an ideal world, this week, you would conduct three technical interviews with real companies. However, because it may be difficult to arrange three of these interviews in person, for this assignment you will instead practice three technical interviews with a Large Language Model (LLM) AI system.
For this assignment you may use any LLM AI system that you like (and you might consider using a variety of them to have a better experience). Some free options include:
- Google Gemini
- Bing Chat
- OpenAI ChatGPT
- Claude AI
Progress on your Informational Interviews
As you know, during this course, you need to conduct at least three informational interviews. If you have not already completed these three interviews, you should contact at least five additional people this week.
In your assignment submission, you will report on your progress with these interviews.
Instructions
First, download the Week 04 Assignment Report document which you will fill out during this assignment.
Conduct Three Practice Technical Interviews
Complete the following:
- Complete at least three separate technical job interviews with an AI system. You should spend at least 30 minutes for each interview and have significant back and forth interactions with the AI system (for example, you should answer at least 5-10 questions). If the AI system starts to wrap up earlier than that, you should ask it to give you more questions.
- Start each interview by asking this question:
- Take on the role of a technical job interviewer for a software development job, who is interviewing a new college graduate for a software development position. Ask me questions like you would in a technical interview.
- At the end of each interview, ask this question:
- Thank you. From our overall conversation, what do you think I could do better next time?
- Copy and paste the transcript of your three interviews into the appropriate section of the assignment reporting document (for example, Interview #1).
Tips for working with the AI Interview
Sometimes the AI is better than others at asking good questions. Remember, the goal here is for you to practice, not to get it to agree that you are doing a good job. So, you may need to dig deeper or steer the conversation in a good direction to have a good experience.
Here are some general tips:
- If the interviewer asks multiple questions at once, choose one of them that is challenging to you and answer that one.
- You can ask the interviewer to ask more or deeper questions about any topic you would like.
- If it finishes early, ask it to keep asking you more questions.
- If you are not familiar with the language it asks about, you can tell it a different language that you prefer.
- It will often let you off easy with very short answers. Avoid the temptation to answer this way. Instead, try to give good, complete answers. This will allow it to give you more detailed feedback.
- Consider trying different AI systems. They all have slightly different styles.
Reflect on the Interviews
At the top of your submission document answer the following questions:
- What was the most important insight you gained from this assignment?
- What was the most difficult question you encountered?
- What are three things that you can improve on in your technical interviewing?
Submission
After you have finished the instructions above:
- Return to Canvas to submit the document.
Other Links:
- Return to Week Overview | Course Home