Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2018 January 21

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January 21

Job interview question

I have a job interview for a programming job coming up tomorrow morning. I have found myself over and over again with the same problem in job interviews.

How do I explain to the interviewer that at work, I would need some channel to actually receive the work tasks I am supposed to do? I can't just sit there at my desk wondering what I should do or go around asking people for work to do.

At my previous jobs, there has been an issue tracking system, such as Atlassian Jira, where my superiors have assigned me work to do, such as "We need a software component that does this and this", sometimes with a specification of what information to fetch from where and what to do with it. My actual task has been figuring out the best solution to actually implement this in actual code, starting with planning the overall design of the code structure in my head, and then getting to the actual coding work.

I don't have experience of designing new features to the company's product out of the blue. I wouldn't even know if anyone would ever need or use them. How do I explain this without sounding like I'm some sort of beginner coder who needs someone to hold my hand and explain the code to me line by line? JIP | Talk 22:56, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Unless you're applying for an extremely junior, or perhaps extremely specialised, coding job, then your problem is the problem. When someone his hiring for a more senior position, they're not necessary looking for a "better" coder, they're looking for someone with a broader understanding of the problem domain (and of the company's and customer's needs) and someone who knows how to determine the real technical problems that exist and how to solve them with the technology available. That's someone who does understand the company's product, the competitors', the market space, and the needs (and desires) of current and potential customers. That's not out of the blue, but it's certainly a task for someone who is multi-skilled and self-starting. If you only want to be the rather passive recipient of a technically-detailed todo list provided by someone else, you run the risk of being a low-status, low-value mushroom coder. And those, bluntly, are the easiest jobs for a company to out source to comparatively low wage remote workers. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 23:52, 21 January 2018 (UTC)