I ask this question to every Backend Engineer I interview

Light video today discussing my interviewing skills for software engineering positions. I always ask this open ended question and allow the candidate to go free.

0:00 Background on Interviews
5:00 Interview Question

Fundamentals of Backend Engineering Design patterns udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)

Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)

Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon)

Introduction to NGINX (link redirects to udemy with coupon)

Python on the Backend (link redirects to udemy with coupon)

Become a Member on YouTube

Buy me a coffee if you liked this

Arabic Software Engineering Channel

🔥 Members Only Content

[aamin]

FUN FACT - There are a lot of interviewers who want to show off their skills other than evaluating the candidate. Everyone is different and every problem can be solved differently. Thanks Nasser for speaking out loud. ✌️

[TehPoet]

If I gave this as an interview question, I'd expect the first part of the response to be a couple of clarifying questions, like..
Is it EXACTLY 60 seconds each time?
When the UI "freezes" does it become completely and totally unresponsive?

Those two alone will narrow it down a lot. If it is exactly 60 seconds each time to the millisecond then I doubt it will be a data access issue, even the in built query caching will be sufficient to return it faster the next time, and if the input variables change each time you would expect the time it takes to respond to also vary. The data is eventually displayed, so it's not going to be a timeout issue. If it's a WebUI and that's freezing, then you're maybe looping through an incredibly large data set which just happens to take 60 seconds to process. If it's an application UI freezing, you probably only have a single thread and you're going everything in there. From there there's still a huge amount of possibilities for what it could be, and an even larger of ways for testing for each of them.

My money is on clicking the button sets a cron job to run in exactly 59 seconds, and takes 1 second to complete
😂😂😂

[shantanutripathi]

started watching your videos from some time, must say that the way you explain and discuss things is very impressive and rare at the same time.

[Videofiziert]

If someone asked me that I would probably like to ask them back what position exactly I'm being interviewed for

[invictuswildlife]

@Hussein, I really love to hear you talking. You amaze me with your tremendous knowledge and keenness to learn new things.
Software Engineering is a rampage now a days but you not only teach us new things but also how to become a calm, cool and a passionate Engineer. Kudos to you ! Please keep up the great work !

[deepakjoseph]

She ended up accepting another offer. Totally relatable.

[DushyantDeshwal]

I gave my first interview last week and it was just like this.I got the offer. My first job ! Thanks Hussein for awesome guides you have on your channel.When i watch your videos i more driven towards what i am doing .

[EmptyGlass]

Unless it's an entry-level job, all questions should be general like this. It's virtually impossible to have good knowledge of all technologies, so not knowing something shouldn't be viewed as a bad thing - it's how you go about learning that is important.

[lacascadaobregon]

I absolutely love your enthusiasm when you speak about the interviewer's response, and how their eyes open up. I actually am dying to have one of those conversations. Cant get past the recruiters though

[vaishak_vk]

This is one of the questions that I ask when I take interviews. Not the exact question - but something similar where answers are open ended. Asking these kind of questions will allow even the interviewer to gain knowledge. Sometimes you get brilliant answers that you would have never even thought of before.

[ZaphyrVonGenevese]

This is how interviews should go. Love it.

[SunnySneezer]

5:15 Separate the frontend from backend, if you lag its front end.
Separate reverse proxy and backend by using a mock db and a call with something like postman, if it lags its the reverse proxy.
Make a raw call to the db if it lags its the db, or just find out by process of elimination.
Several combinations can also be the cause but this is a simplistic answer to your question.

[iftekharkhan]

Using the sentence that the 'application freezes' clearly means the JS call stack is executing a blocking call which is causing this to happen. That is the only reason. Make your API call ASync and the app will not freeze. Now if you would tell the candidate that the 'API is taking 60 secs' to return the response then they could debug the backend services/proxy for the problem.

[camdenparsons]

The generalist actually emerges as the most productive in the age of cloud computing. I think what your getting at in this vid is that fundamentals of software engineering doesn't boil down to just algorithmic questions, which I agree with. (learning algorithim was very helpful for me anyways)

[shahzadse]

Adjust the speed to 1.25x and now you are perfect to go. BTW, great video!

[gianluca.g]

First thing I would do is to check where exactly the wait is happening, client side or server side. With Wireshark you can see if the reply from the server is taking a long time or not. If not, then I'll investigate on the client, otherwise I'll concentrate the effort on the server. On the server, split again between the database and the actual server application: a breakpoint should be enough to check this.

[nathanhedglin]

Great question. Highlights how they approach problems and break them down. I’m a full stack bootcamp instructor. My students like to rush to writing code to fix an issue. I tell them slow down and walk through the whole stack to find the problem.

[erniemntolo]

Good question Hussein! I like it very much because it really tests someone's troubleshooting skills. When you have a problem in Production that is affecting customers you need it solved as soon as possible and you definitely want to hire a developer who can do that. Knowing how to troubleshoot problems comes with experience and you can easily tell if someone has never done much of it before. It also amazes me when a developer won't even look at the available logs when there is a problem.

[junzheliang]

Wow, thank you so much for the great content, Hussein! This interview question really opens my mind, and it is also a great question to ask other people when we want to learn things from different perspectives. I just started learning backend engineering, and I've been following your tutorial. Thank you!!

[Norman_Fleming]

Love that you ask real world questions of things which would happen. I have always felt it is much better to just talk about the real thing you face in your company. If they can bring something to the discussion, excellent. If an interview is handled more like a conversation you get a much better view of the candidates and they can understand what they will be facing.