IT interview preparation for developers
Switching jobs means interviewing again after years of doing the work instead. The questions are no longer about what you studied; they are about what you built, what broke, and the trade-offs you would make. Technical interview preparation at this stage is less about learning new material and more about saying what you already know, clearly, under follow-up questions.
Preparing for your first job? Start with interview preparation for freshers.
How a developer interview loop runs
Companies vary the order and the number, but most loops for an experienced developer are built from the same five rounds.
Recruiter screen
Your current role, notice period, expected pay and why you are moving. Short, but an unclear reason for leaving follows you into every later round.
Coding round
One or two problems, live. With experience the bar moves from "can you solve it" to "can you solve it cleanly, explain it and test it".
Technical deep-dive
Your stack and your own work: a system you built, a production incident, a decision you would defend. This is where experience is checked rather than claimed.
Design round
Low-level design (classes and interfaces) from about two years in; high-level system design as you get more senior. Scope and trade-offs score, not boxes.
Manager and HR rounds
Ownership, conflict, how you work in a team — then the offer conversation. Concrete examples from your current job beat general statements every time.
What changes with experience
Up to two years
Fundamentals still matter, but the project discussion moves to your job: what you shipped, what you own, what broke. Expect LLD-style questions to start appearing.
Two to four years
Depth in your stack, debugging stories, and design. "How would you build this feature so it is easy to change" replaces "what is polymorphism".
Four years and more
System design and trade-offs carry the most weight, along with influence: mentoring, pushing back on a decision, owning an outcome end to end.
Technical interview preparation, round by round
Coding
Arrays, hashing, trees and graphs, solved out loud with the complexity stated before you code.
Your stack
What the framework does for you, what it costs, and the bug you would recognise from experience.
Design
Classes and interfaces for a feature, then services, storage and scaling for a system. Agree the scope before you design anything.
Behavioural
Five or six real stories from your job — a conflict, a mistake, a deadline, something you owned — each told with what you did.
Talking about your current job
For an experienced candidate, your current work is the project discussion. It is also where most answers go vague.
- Describe the problem and your decisions, not the client or internal names — you can be specific without breaking an NDA.
- Only quote numbers you could explain if asked how they were measured.
- Say "I" for what you did and "we" for what the team did, and know the difference.
- Give a reason for leaving that points at what you want next, not at what you dislike now.
A four-week plan around a full-time job
- Week 1 — List the stories: three projects, two incidents, one disagreement. Write each in four lines.
- Week 2 — Coding every day, out loud, with complexity stated. One scored round at the end of the week.
- Week 3 — Design: one LLD and one system design problem every other day, scoped before drawn.
- Week 4 — Full scored interviews across rounds, then fix whatever the breakdowns keep naming.
Run a round before the loop that counts
A round with Sia, at Senior difficulty
Three, five or eight questions with follow-ups on what you actually said. Choose a Challenging interviewer style for no praise and a follow-up on everything, and get a scored breakdown the moment you finish.
A live interview with an engineer
Forty minutes over Zoom. Tell them the role and stack when you book; they read it beforehand, score five criteria and write up what to fix.
How scoring works · Pay per session, no subscription.
Questions developers ask
How long should I prepare before switching jobs?
Four to six weeks of steady preparation is common for a developer with a job, a little each day rather than a weekend sprint. Start earlier if you have not done a coding round in years.
Do I need system design with two years of experience?
Usually low-level design rather than full system design: classes, interfaces and how a feature extends. Full system design becomes standard as you move into senior roles.
How do I talk about work covered by an NDA?
Describe the shape of the problem and the decisions you made, without the client, internal names or numbers you cannot share. Interviewers expect this and are listening for reasoning, not secrets.
Is a round with Sia useful if I interview regularly at work?
Sitting on the other side of the table is a different skill. A round set to Senior difficulty and a Challenging interviewer style is the closest thing to a real loop without one counting.