What Do We Look for in Developers?

By: Will Granger | Updated on: June 10, 2021

Interviews are stressful. From finding time to meet a slew of people with different titles, to handling a dreaded technical curveball, interviewing can feel like a full-time job, except one where you don’t get paid. Amidst all of this, you’re trying to ask the right questions to determine if you’ll want to be a member of the team six months after signing the acceptance letter. At the very least, knowing what to expect would take some stress out of the interview process.

At LogicGate, we want you to be prepared every step of the way: from your first chat with a team member, to your final onsite. We figure the best way to prepare is to know exactly what we’ll ask, so consider this a crib sheet for your interview journey. What can you expect from your first day on the job to your one-year anniversary and beyond? While we can’t create a time machine to look at your one-year anniversary, we can describe what we look for in employees and the culture we provide at LogicGate.

What does LogicGate look for in engineers?

Aside from bug-smashing and coding skills, we look for engineers who are considerate, curious, and collaborative. Being a considerate engineer doesn’t just mean organizing variables alphabetically with meaningful names. While we appreciate taking the time to clean up code, a thoughtful engineer considers the user and recognizes how every line of code committed helps solve a larger business problem.

We also look for engineers who anticipate problems before they occur and are happy to research solutions that could improve our team’s efficiency. When the answer isn’t obvious, are they willing to reach out for help, jump on a call to pair, or message a channel for clarification?

While we appreciate coding capabilities and prowess in certain areas of the stack, we are just as closely looking for how a candidate helps enhance our six core values. We hope that anyone joining our team strengthens our commitment to these values as they grow into their position.

What can I expect from the interview process?

Our goal is to have a breezy interview process, especially considering candidates use their free time to apply. We aim for transparency while being careful not to waste anyone’s time.

1. Phone Screen

A team member will reach out to you for a casual chat, usually no more than 30 minutes. While chatting, communication is key. We look for engineers who strengthen our core values, which are integral parts of our organization. Have you embraced curiosity by trying out new testing utilities? Have you done the right thing by taking ownership of a mistake you made in the past?

Most importantly, what are you looking for? Everyone has a different vision of the ideal workplace. We’d like to hear what motivates you in your career — whether that’s thoughtful perks or opportunities to learn. Finally, do you see LogicGate as a place where you can thrive? If so, we’re happy to be a potential next step in your journey.

2. Hiring Manager Interview

Don’t worry, we won’t be asking you to pseudo-code Dijkstra’s algorithm or tell us how to set up CD variables. This is a two-way conversation between you and a member of our engineering team, so feel free to show off and name some technologies! When you’re met with a challenging problem, what are some tools you’ve used?

We also want to hear how you like to work with other team members. Do you prefer to jump on a call and chat about technical issues, write a bulleted list of edge cases, or perhaps you appreciate starting a thread with other engineers? One of our values at LogicGate is to be as one. We hope to discover the skills you bring to LogicGate that help strengthen and empower our growing development team.

3. Tech Challenge

You’ll then receive a take-home challenge catered to the role you applied for. We haven’t slipped any hidden bugs into the code to make you squirm. Instead, we want to see how you tackle problem solving. We hope these challenges highlight your skills without wasting time with unnecessary fluff.

Overall, we’re looking for:

  • Comfort in the coding language of your stack
  • Consideration to keep code tidy and use thoughtful naming conventions
  • Ability to follow instructions and determine critical functionality
  • Recognition of existing code patterns
  • Ability to discuss your thought process in a recap

4. Onsite

The final step of our process is an onsite, which may or may not happen in our Chicago office. This is the first time you’ll get to see our app in action. Many of us hadn’t heard of GRC before starting at LogicGate, so this is a good opportunity to ask how our app helps empower customers to solve their unique challenges.

As you meet more members of the team, we’ll revisit the technical competencies and core values from earlier calls. We’d also like to hear your thoughts on the technical challenge. What was your thought process when solving the challenge? After submission, did you consider another approach that might have worked?

We’re also available to answer any questions about working at LogicGate: what perks do we offer, how closely do we collaborate, why do we have a goat for a mascot?

We recognize LogicGate is also being interviewed, so we welcome any questions that come to mind. Overall, we hope you finish this step with a good idea of what we do and how we operate. If any question remains unanswered, feel free to reach out to a member of our team.

What is it like to work at LogicGate?

We want to get you involved as soon as possible. While some of the first week is spent onboarding, you’ll be greeted with several “easy win” tickets to get your feet wet without drowning in tasks.

As your knowledge of our app grows, you’ll tackle more challenges and become familiar with your squad’s responsibilities. Over the following months, small wins become larger victories, and you’ll begin touching new parts of the app or stack, should you desire. We definitely want our candidates to explore their interests and embrace curiosity.

We embrace the agile flow at LogicGate, which you’ll notice from the daily stand and ticket pointing, to a retrospective at the end of each sprint. We also encourage pairing with one another — even in our remote-first environment. All our developers, project managers, etc. work collaboratively and are quick to jump on a call with one another to solve a bug, clean up some logic, or figure out how to implement a user story.

Using the crawl, walk, run approach also helps us develop new features. Why create a monstrous new set of changes in one fell swoop when we can disassemble a feature into smaller pieces? This helps our entire engineering team, from frontend engineers to QA testers, develop, implement, and sign off on new features.

Interested?

Find out more about our open positions here.