Software Engineer 路 Intern to senior
General software engineering interviews are usually language-agnostic. Expect a coding problem, questions about how a language you know works under the hood, a design discussion and behavioral questions about how you work with a team.
112 questions
Java 8 introduced lambda expressions, functional interfaces, the Stream API for declarative collection processing, Optional to represent missing values, default methods in interfaces, method references and the java.time date and time API.
Default argument values are evaluated once when the function is defined, so a default list or dictionary is shared between every call that does not pass its own, causing data to leak between calls.
A shallow copy creates a new container but reuses the same nested objects, while a deep copy recursively copies everything so the new object is fully independent.
A classmethod receives the class as its first argument (cls) and can create or configure instances, while a staticmethod receives no automatic argument and is just a function placed inside the class namespace.
A load balancer distributes incoming requests across several servers to improve capacity and availability, using algorithms such as round robin, least connections or consistent hashing.
Both integrate changes from one branch into another: merge keeps both histories and joins them with a merge commit, while rebase rewrites your commits so they appear on top of the target branch, giving a linear history.
Open the conflicted files, decide what the final code should be between the conflict markers, remove the markers, run the tests, then stage the files and continue the merge or rebase.
Use a small, pinned base image, order instructions so dependencies are cached before source code, use multi-stage builds to leave build tools out of the final image, run as a non-root user and keep secrets out of the image.
Mocking replaces a real dependency with a controllable fake so a test can run in isolation and check how the code interacts with it; use it for slow, non-deterministic or external dependencies, not for everything.
Recursively walk the array: when an element is an array, flatten it and append the result; otherwise append the element. An iterative version uses an explicit stack to avoid recursion limits.
Choose a real project with a technical or organisational challenge, explain your specific role and decisions with the STAR method, and finish with the result and what you learned.
Walk through how you noticed the issue, limited the impact, found the root cause, fixed it, and what you changed afterwards so the same class of bug could not happen again.
Choose a real mistake, take ownership, explain the impact, what you did to recover, and what you changed so it would not happen again.
Describe feedback that was uncomfortable but useful, explain how you responded, and show the measurable or observable improvement that followed.
Choose a genuine failure, explain why it failed, what you owned, how you recovered, and what you changed in future projects.
Show how you prioritized the essential outcome, communicated trade-offs, reduced risk and delivered without pretending everything could be done.
Show that you can defend a technical decision with evidence while remaining open to a better argument.
Keep the answer professional and future-focused: explain what you are looking for next without attacking your current or former employer.
The event loop is the mechanism that lets single-threaded JavaScript handle asynchronous work: it runs the call stack to empty, then runs all queued microtasks (promises), then takes the next task (timers, events) from the queue.
In JavaScript every object has an internal link to another object called its prototype, and property lookups walk up this prototype chain until the property is found or the chain ends.