The Modern Leader
Ah, everyone’s favorite experience: the technical interview. We’ve heard the horror stories from individual contributors—sometimes it’s leetcode, sometimes it’s system design, sometimes you’ll be asked to code something vague or, my personal favorite, whiteboard something as if you were coding because that is totally how we do our work.
Engineering Manager technical interviews are a bit of a different kind of mixed bag. Sure, you may be tested on your ability to code if the leadership role does require hands-on coding. Meta, for example, still requires leetcode tests for EMs last time I checked. Block had an option for hands-on technical coding interviews, but when I interviewed with them long ago, it was something I could opt out of as my superpower is on the people side.
The key here is most companies are hiring you for your ability to direct your team to complete projects, not you. We don’t require hands-on coding for our EM interviews for this reason; instead, we’re evaluating your technical prowess through a system design exercise.
While you can’t perfectly prepare one way for every company’s interview process, I wanted to use this newsletter to document the best ways you can prepare for technical interviews I’ve seen for EMs. It’s impossible to cover everything here in 5 minutes, but if you’re interviewing for EM roles, hopefully this can be of some help.
Here are three possible (better than coding) interview questions you may be asked:
A question focused on reasoning through a particular subject at a broader level. For example, your organization is going to revamp their authorization and permissions system. You can either build a solution in-house or leverage a pre-built solution. Talk me through the trade-offs of going with one or the other and what side effects you may expect. Explain to me how you’d evaluate which option is best and how you’d discuss this with your team. I would expect you to know broadly how permissions systems work, but I’m not going to deduct credit if you don’t get your acronyms perfectly comparing RBAC to ReBAC to ABAC. We would talk through build vs. buy. I’d expect you to also ask me additional questions around what’s wrong with the current auth/permissions flow and what is prompting the refactor, and also more about the current permissions system itself.
A system architecture question. Similar to the above question but more focused on the actual system architecture vs. the business needs. For example, we may discuss the key components to a public API and I’d dig into how you’d think through API key generation, utilization of an API gateway, and how you approach rate limiting and keeping costs and system load in control.
A role play of a bad engineering or architecture plan. Essentially you’re presented with a flawed solution to a problem—perhaps it doesn’t address the correct problem, or maybe it’s over-engineered, or maybe there are a million holes you can poke in the current plan because it lacks depth. These are common conversations you are likely having as an Engineering Manager, and I would need to know that even if you are not getting your hands on the code, you can provide tactical feedback to your team on how they can take a poorly structured plan and make it rock solid.
And finally: if you’re a hiring manager for an Engineering Manager role, my best advice to you is this: If you expect an EM to be doing this work on the day-to-day for their job, feel free to ask them about it in an interview. If they won’t be getting hands-on, don’t ask them to get hands-on in the interview. You can still evaluate technical ability without having them divulge deep into big O notation but perhaps instead talk more broadly about the performance of a particular function and how you may improve it.