What do you do if your software engineering interview focuses on highlighting important skills?

my thoughts , we should have good knowledge on basic concepts, also it good to explain with some live examples which get aligned as per JD.

In my experience, I believe it’s important to understand the fundamentals rather than basic knowledge. Let’s take example, if we learn OOPs concepts or recursion then there is a high possibility we might forget. But understanding, why OOPs is important and what challenges it solves will allow me to traceback how it’s useful. Same goes with the recursion, learning a code how it’s done you might forget. But learning, every recursion need to have stop condition, iteration condition and at time start condition. Just understanding why will, never make you forget them.

Taking initiative is an important behavior I look for in my software engineers. Like the Cub Scout rule, how do you make the code better than what it was before you touched it.

Make sure you communicate to the hiring manager that you are strong in programming concepts and the quality of code if of utmost important to you. Also, mention what are the concepts you to incorporate in your code like modularity, re-usability, object oriented concepts, unit testing, configurability, security and role based access.

1 - Self-Assessment: Identify strengths and areas for improvement. 2 - Research: Understand company, role, and tech requirements. 3 - Core Skills: Focus on fundamentals like data structures and algorithms. 4 - Problem-Solving: Practice coding challenges for efficiency. 5 - Communication: Articulate thoughts clearly and highlight soft skills. 6 - Continuous Learning: Seek feedback and improve for future interviews.

First Communicate briefly about the project you completed and then highlight how you faced different and complicated (it is subjective, but don't be shy to embrace your shortcomings and your unique solutions) problems and how the solution was devised by you.

-Project Portfolio: Emphasize key projects from your portfolio that demonstrate your abilities and experience. -Explain Your Role: Describe your specific contributions and responsibilities for each project. -Technical Challenges: Discuss the complex problems you solved and the innovative solutions you devised. -Collaboration and Leadership: Demonstrate teamwork and leadership skills in project settings. -Results and Impact: Highlight your projects' outcomes as well as their business impact.

Show examples of the projects that you developed. Show how it was a value add for the company. Also talk about technical challenges you faced and how you solved them. How you were able to learn some new technologies to solve these problems. How you made sure all integrations work securely.

Asking for a problem involving those particular skills and formulating a solution covering most of those skills required would be enough to get you a thumbs up??

Ask them to give you a problem and quickly write pseudo code. Show how you use algorithms to solve some of these problems. Emphasize on the concepts you used. Talk about the challenges if these concepts are not used.

If you’re doing a technical interview (coding or systems design, for example) talk through your thought process, any assumptions you’re making, and choices you are making. What are you optimizing for? Why are you using X instead of Y?

Communicate to them how you gathered requirements from business users and documented them correctly so that scope is clear to all stakeholders. Inform how you made sure all the stakeholders are engaged and communicated to them what kind of objects are being developed. Follow Agile methodology so that deliverables are tested by stakeholders constantly.

Talk about how quickly you learn new technologies. Also, speak about instances where you were adaptable to changing environments and requirements and quickly embraced the change.

You should have ready a few stories of when things didn’t go well. Have ready: - how things got off track (miscommunications, changing circumstances, underestimates of complexity, etc) - how you handled it in the moment - what you learned from it - what you would do differently now/how you have applied the lessons learned