General Interview Questions

1) Tell me about yourself.
Ans: This is regular basic question asked in interviews. Try to brief about yourself as short as possible, do not describe the history of your family or town from where you are coming.
Present it in very simple manner which would give positive impression on other person. You can use the following:

- Your name (may include hometown details and parent's details)
- You education details (be short)
- Your employers, experience
- Your achivements, certifications

2) Tell me about some of the recent projects you have worked with?
Ans: Brief about recent projects (which are listed in Resume) you have worked on. Also is imperative that during your briefing, you demonstrate how you applied your skills and knowledge in the project.

3) Why are you leaving your current position?
Ans:Do not criticize your previous employer or coworkers or sound too opportunistic. It is fine to mention a major problem like a buy out, budget constraints, merger or liquidation.
You may also say that your chance to make a contribution is very low due to company wide changes or looking for a more challenging senior or designer role.

4) What do you like and/or dislike most about your current and/or last position?
Ans: The interviewer is trying to find the compatibility with the open position. So
Try Not to mention:
- You dislike overtime.
- You dislike management or coworkers etc.

You could use the following:
- You like challenges.
- Opportunity to grow into design, architecture, performance tuning etc.
- You dislike frustrating situations like identifying a memory leak problem or a complex transactional or a concurrency issue. You want to get on top of it as soon as possible.

5) What are your strengths and weaknesses?

Ans:
Strengths:
- Focus on Customer Staisfaction
- Taking initiatives and being pro-active: You can illustrate how you took initiative to fix a transactional issue,a performance problem or a memory leak problem.
- Team work and collabration, quick responsive
- Approachable for any issues
- Problem solving skills: Explain how you will break a complex problem into more manageable sub-sections and then apply brain storming and analytical skills to solve the complex problem.
- Open Communication: Always willing to listen to new ideas, or to adopt alternative approaches
- Communication skills: Illustrate that you can communicate effectively with all the team members, business analysts, users, testers, stake holders etc.
- Ability to work in a team environment as well as independently: Illustrate that you are technically sound to work independently as well as have the interpersonal skills to fit into any team environment.
- Hard working, honest, and conscientious etc are the adjectives to describe you.

Weaknesses:
Select a trait and come up with a solution to overcome your weakness. Stay away from personal qualities and concentrate more on professional traits for example:
- I pride myself on being an attention to detail guy but sometimes miss small details. So I am working on applying the 80/20 principle to manage time and details. Spend 80% of my effort and time on 20% of the tasks, which are critical and important to the task at hand.
- Some times when there is a technical issue or a problem I tend to work continuously until I fix it without having a break. But what I have noticed and am trying to practise is that taking a break away from the problem and thinking outside the square will assist you in identifying the root cause of the problem sooner.

6) Miscellaneous instructions:
- Try to find out the needs of the project in which you will be working and the needs of the people within the project. Try to get Business flow and basic architecture or request flow of recent project(s)
- Most of the interview questions are based on your own resume. So include only those things which you feel you can answer confident
- Where possible briefly demonstrate how you applied your skills/knowledge in the key areas and handled situations in your own way
- Always be honest to answer technical questions, you are not expected to remember or know everything in your area
- Do not be critical, focus on what you can do. Also try to be humorous to show your elegance
- Do not act superior or arrogant