Describing a group project

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Del curso dictado por University of California San Diego

Mastering the Software Engineering Interview

439 calificaciones

University of California San Diego

Mastering the Software Engineering Interview

439 calificaciones

Curso 4 de 5 en SpecializationObject Oriented Java Programming: Data Structures and Beyond

You’ve hit a major milestone as a computer scientist and are becoming a capable programmer. You now know how to solve problems, write algorithms, and analyze solutions; and you have a wealth of tools (like data structures) at your disposal. You may now be ready for an internship or (possibly) an entry-level software engineering job. But can you land the internship/job? It depends in part on how well you can solve new technical problems and communicate during interviews. How can you get better at this? Practice! With the support of Google’s recruiting and engineering teams we’ve provided tips, examples, and practice opportunities in this course that may help you with a number of tech companies. We’ll assist you to organize into teams to practice. Lastly, we’ll give you basic job search advice, and tips for succeeding once you’re on the job.

De la lección

Explaining what you've already done

This week, we’re going to focus on how to speak about your experiences working on projects and how to speak about the technical problems you’ve experienced and how you’ve solved those problems. We’ll introduce the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Results) model for presenting your work, and discuss how to and how not to present the problem you worked on and the solution you developed. We’ll also discuss the communication skills that are critical to this task. It’s a fun week with lots of examples (both good and bad), which ends with an assignment where you will present your own work on video and submit this video for peer review.

Eye Contact, Speaking, and Projecting Excitement4:10

When I struggled: A surprising discovery0:33

Responding to Your Audience3:39

Describing a group project7:02

Conoce a los instructores

Mia Minnes
Assistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Leo Porter
Assistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Christine Alvarado
Associate Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering

[MUSIC]

Okay, so we've looked at soft skills of communications, like eye contact and

speech patterns.

And we've looked at very tricky skill of how to answer questions on your technical

explanations effectively and appropriately.

The last piece that we're going to focus on here in our soft skills lesson,

is about how to talk about your contribution to group work.

So by the end of this video,

you'll be able to appropriately describe your contribution to a group project.

So what you're going to find in these interviews is that

sometimes you'll be talking about a project that you've done.

But often times these projects that you've done take place in a larger context

of a group.

And sometimes interviewers are interested in your own contribution, but

often what they're interested in too is how you work as a team.

How you work in the context of a larger group project, and

how you're a productive team member.

So they want to get a sense of how you work in a group and

what your particular contribution to a project is.

So the question that might come in many forms,

they might ask you to talk about challenges you faced in group work.

Or they might ask you talk about a large project and describe your contribution and

how it fits into a whole.

Now the technical piece of your explanation can match what

we have been talking about all week, describing the problem, and the solution,

and how it all fits together.

When we bring in the specific group work piece,

there's some added subtleties to what you'll want to think about.

So one thing, as I mentioned, that they might ask you is to talk about challenges

you faced, when you are working as part of a team.

So let's take a look at Howard,

a Google engineer who's going to respond to that particular question.

Okay. So

why don't you tell me about a project you've worked on in

one of your prior positions, and if there were any challenges

working on that project if you could describe them and how you overcame them.

>> So I recently finished a product,

serving primarily as a web software engineer, in the mobile analytic space.

And so it was a AngularJS JavaScript heavy client application.

And I worked on a new team with a large diversity of really smart people.

I think there are a lot of awesome opportunities and experiences I had.

One, just growing my web development experience and

really seeing a project of this scale be released to production.

But there are definitely some challenges, right?

As I mentioned,

I was working with a large team of as large diversity of types of folks.

People with different skill sets, abilities, backgrounds, views and

perspectives.

And so one of the challenges was to really ensure that I was positioning myself

within the project to be as helpful and as most most effective

as I'm communicating and working with others as possible.

I think another challenge was seeing the design and architecture process

from the perspective that spanned outside of a technical viewpoint, right.

And so looking at different people's aspirations professionally and

technical areas of development.

And allowing them to grow continuing as a software engineer

through that design process is one of the areas as well that was a bit challenging,

but we were definitely able to do.

>> All right, so what you can see is that Howard highlighted the challenges

that he faced, and how he was able to overcome those challenges

to make the groups work even more productive than

it would've been if everybody had just been working individually.

That's a really good thing, because one very important thing that they're

evaluating you on is how will this person become part of our team?

Is this somebody that we really want to work with that's going

to make our organization more productive?

Other times they might be looking for something a little more technical.

In particular, looking for

how your personal contribution lead to the flourishing of the groups work in general.

For example, when I talked about the problem that I worked on as part of

the Course III development, when we were developing that map application.

I only told you about a very small piece that was my contribution to a specific

part of that project.

But in fact, this was a much larger project that involved the work of myself

and two of my students who were helping me out.

So we had to work together in a team.

So as you probably remember, this was a mapping application where we wanted to

pull down real world data from the internet, and then distill that

data in a way that the learners can work with it, using these graph algorithms.

And then display all of that data in this nice front end.

And if you haven't taken our third course,

I really encourage you to go check out that project.

It's really cool.

But this involved dividing up the work between myself and the students.

So, I was in charge of the project as the faculty member in charge.

So the way I divided the task was that I was going to focus on

the pieces of the code and the project that were closer to the learners,

that the learners had to work with.

And my students Adam and Alec could focus on pulling the data,

so the back end getting the data into the system, and

then displaying the data through this nice front end that they developed.

But of course, there were interfaces between these pieces.

So, we needed to establish the interfaces where I would know what data to expect and

what data they could give me and in what format, and

then what data I needed to provide to them.

So early on in the project, very early on we established these interface boundaries

and this allowed us to develop our own pieces independent of each other

while being confident that at the end of the day they could all fit together.

Now interfaces are never seamless, so open communication and

regular meetings are also key.

We would meet at least once a week to hash out the technical details of

each of our parts.

And make that those interfaces were still fit in together

the way we expected them to fit together.

And, do this process of open communication, repeated work,

and very early focus on the way our pieces were going to fit together,

we were able to create a really, good, successful product.

And all in all, this work experience was fantastic.

I had a lot of fun working on this team, because we all shared in this very

same goal of getting this product up and running.

And we work productively through these interfaces in these open communication

channels.

We all respected each other's work, and

that helped contribute to the general positive overall approach of the team.

So you can see in that explanation, I went into a little more technical detail.

How did we break the work down?

What was my personal contribution and what did my teammates provide?

And how were we able to create a successful group working environment?

So, as you start working on your technical explanations, we are not in the assignment

going to ask you specifically to talk about group work necessarily.

But do keep in mind these are questions you could get asked.

And we encourage you to practice talking about how your

project fit into a larger piece of group work.

Cause just like everything else, practice is what's really going to make for

a really good performance in an interview setting.

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