What to Expect at an Engineering Interview transcript

In this video, I'm going to talk about engineering interviews and what to expect. These will mainly be focused on internships and entry- level jobs for those in college or recently graduated and are looking for jobs. Now, I have my own experience and I know my friends and I've done research on others and I can say that job interviews will differ a good amount, but there are also a lot of consistencies I will talk about.

So, first I want to talk about technical questions cuz this may be on your mind. Technical questions don't always come up, but they definitely can. I knew people who didn't have them, but I personally had them for every interview. These are where they ask you technical questions like a quiz related to your major and that you can answer fairly quickly, but may require some work to solve. So, a mechanical engineer may be asked to draw a free body diagram or explain the second law of thermodynamics.

A software engineer or computer science major may be asked to write code on the whiteboard or on the computer. It won't be too long most likely, but it will take some time to figure out. For example, Facebook does this for incoming engineers. Maybe not every single one, but it definitely is common. Be sure to go over algorithms because that is one big thing that employers want to see that you have a grasp on. I personally, as an electrical engineer, was asked things like name a passive and active circuit component and to explain how wireless signals lose power over some distance.

Only for one interview did someone come in with multiple sheets of paper and a pencil and have me do problems that needed hand calculations like drawing a simple graph to represent the response from a given circuit. Then you might come across those really abstract questions, but I don't think these are super common. But something like how would you cure world hunger which was asked in an Amazon interview. In Elon Musk's biography, it says that he would ask people in interviews at SpaceX a riddle.

The riddle was you're standing on the surface of the earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you? After some thinking, I'm sure many of you will come across the correct solution of the north pole. But if you got that right, then he would say, "What's another solution?" And it becomes not so easy. And no, it's not the South Pole. Turns out there are an infinite amount of solutions.

If you can't figure it out, I've provided an article that contains the solution below. Now, two things I want to emphasize referring back to the other types of questions that are not abstract. And one is that it is okay to not know some answers. If maybe you're given one coding problem and you don't know that one, then it could hurt you, which I've heard from people. But when you have more questions, it's okay that you don't know all of them.

There wasn't one interview I went into where I knew every single question, but I still got offers. But you want to make sure you explain your thinking out loud. That's a big thing they are looking for. Even if you don't know, say, "I don't know exactly how to do this, but I do know that." And just explain anything that you can because you shouldn't just give up like you don't know anything about the problem. Don't try to fake your way to a solution, but also don't just sit there in silence trying to do the problem on your own.

Studying is always a good thing before an interview, but you don't need to memorize a bunch of complicated formulas or problems. Just try to make sure you have a good foundation for some important concepts that would apply to the job that you're going for. Then it's likely you will get some type of typical interview questions. And it's good to kind of research these and have some answers ready to go. One of the most common questions I've heard of people getting as well as the most common question that I got was name a time you had trouble working with someone and what you did to resolve it.

Definitely a question to come up with an answer to beforehand. As an engineer, you will have lots of labs in colleges, so it's likely you'll have at least something to include for this. But it doesn't have to be college or even engineering related, unless they ask, of course. Another one that comes up is career goals and aspirations. They might ask you short-term goals like 3 to 5 years from now. What do you want to be doing?

I was asked in one interview what I wanted to be doing 20 years from now, which at 22 years old was difficult to answer. But some want to know if you want to become a manager or eventually go the business route or are you going to stay on the engineering path? Do you want to go into research and development, do testing, etc. Questions that I did not hear personally but I did from a good amount of people include what do you enjoy most/leas about engineering?

Why did you select the major that you did? What about our company appealed to you? Or tell me about a time you had to manage people for a project of some kind. Then of course they're going to ask you about you, your resume, your experience, and so on. They may ask you to give a summary of an internship you had. If you have a big project listed on your resume, they will definitely ask you about that. I think when going through my resume, the recruiters focused 90% on my senior project, which was a UAV project, and 10% on everything else.

They really fixated on that one big project I worked on. But they did ask some questions I had to give some thought to, like, what was the hardest part of this project? How did you feel working in the group? What was your favorite part of the project or what did you learn from doing this project? Also, looking at the classes I took, they frequently asked me what my favorite classes were and why. Then they might take you on a tour of the company or maybe show you a presentation of what the company does.

Then at the end of the interview, or maybe throughout the interview, they'll ask you if you have any questions for them. And you want to make sure to ask those questions. It's probably obvious, but you want to show interest for working at the company. Questions could be like, "What is a typical day at work like? How do you like working for the company? Will I participate in many team projects? Will the job require much traveling?" And so on.

Now, lastly, I want to include salary expectations, which you most likely will be asked. I'm not going to go into salary negotiation, but just what to include for people who are new to the workforce. If you're trying to get your first job, this might be a hard question of what is your salary expectation, especially if you have no frame of reference. You don't want to ask for too much and just be disqualified, but you don't want to ask for too little cuz even an extra few thousand a year really adds up.

Remember, whatever you start with, you will typically get some percent increase on per year, assuming you stay at that company. But if you manage to start with a little more now with that same raise, it means bigger changes in salary every year, assuming all things equal. And that difference keeps widening every year. The more you get to begin, the more you'll keep getting later on. What I did was I looked at the average starting salaries that people had at the company I was applying to.

I also looked at the average salaries of people in my major with my specialization. And once I got some consistent numbers, I just put that. I think personally, I put 65,000 on most of my job applications. But once you get that first offer and it's at a company you like, you'll feel much more comfortable negotiating at maybe another company you interview for cuz you have that leverage. It's just that first one where at least for me, I was just wanting an offer and really didn't care much about salary, at least within reason.

One piece of advice I'll give is to do research on the company. Go to their website and find out what they are working on, any upcoming projects that they might have, who the company works with, who their clients are, and so on. It really makes an impression if you show that you have knowledge about what the company is working on, and then you can tailor your questions towards them based on what you've researched. And I'm going to stop there, but researching for this video, I came across lots of forums where people discuss their interviews and interview questions and so on.

So, I highly recommend you check those out so you can get a better idea for what to expect. I'd also like to thank Jake Vorhees for collabing with me on this video and giving insight to his interview tips and experience. Jake has over 6 years of experience in engineering and has a YouTube channel on engineering information, student advice, and much more, which is linked below. So, I highly recommend you check him out.

If you like this video, comment, like, and subscribe. And I'll see you all next time. [Music]