Backend Engineer (3rd Year) Job Change Prep: 6-Month Retrospective (Interview Questions Compiled)
At the end of last year, I made up my mind and prepared for 6 months, and I ended up getting final offers from 2 companies. I'm writing this down in case it helps someone.
My prep order was like this:
1. Resume/portfolio, 3 weeks — I rewrote my work history not as "what I did" but as "what problem I solved and how." After changing this, my resume screening pass rate went up a lot.
2. CS + language, 2 months — went deep mainly on Java/Spring, and only covered keywords for the rest.
3. Coding tests, 2 months — 2 problems a day, mainly Silver~Gold.
4. Mock interviews, 2 weeks — this was really effective.
Questions that actually came up:
- What problems occur at each transaction isolation level
- Query patterns that don't use indexes
- How I handled concurrency issues (they kept digging based on my experience)
- When an incident happened, did you roll back, or push a hotfix
What I felt was that technical questions ultimately converge on "do you have experience?" There was a limit to getting through it by memorization.
Salary didn't go up as much as I expected. Still, the job change itself was satisfying. Good luck to everyone preparing.
9 answers
I really agree with #1. The moment I turned my work experience into a problem-solution structure, the response to my application changed.
Well, saying your resume pass rate 'shot up' in just 3 weeks sounds like a bit of an exaggeration. It worked because they already had the right qualifications to begin with; it’s not like that happens for everyone. Isn’t this just the survivor bias typical of job-change success stories?
Concurrency questions really come up a lot. I talked about an experience where I used locking for inventory deduction, then ran into performance issues and moved from pessimistic locks to distributed locks, and they grilled me on that for 30 minutes. In the end, it felt less like they were checking whether I knew the answer and more like they were gauging how far I'd actually dealt with it myself. So when preparing for interviews, it seems right to boldly cut out the things I haven't experienced.