[RFC] Community driven interview question bank

[wlren]

Hello everyone! We are a group of Singaporean students looking to contribute to the Technical Interview Handbook platform by adding an interview question bank to provide REAL interview questions used by tech companies.

The question bank is an extension of the TIH platform and the questions will be contributed by the users themselves after their interviews. We hope to build a sizable pool of questions across genres such as coding, system design, and behavioural questions.

The question bank aims to give candidates a platform to prepare for their technical interviews with real questions for specific companies, locations and roles. This provides a more tailored search experience from the standardized list of top interview questions on sites such as Leetcode/Hackerrank.

Our main features for the question bank will be mentioned below. Feel free to give us any input on the existing features or propose new features!

• Landing page

  • Simple prompt for first time users to start searching for questions by type, company, and location
  • Showcases a carousel of top viewed questions currently on the site

    

• Home page

  • Left side bar
  • Will contain extensive filtering options such as
    • Company
    • Location
    • Question Type (Coding, Behavorial etc)
    • Role / Seniority
    • Question Age
    • More as we get more inputs
  • Question list
  • Shows each individual question along with their key descriptions such as Upvotes, Answers, number of people who has gotten this question, question type, most commonly asked location and job role
  • Posts can be further sorted by Upvotes, Recent, Number of occurrences, Hot topics
  • List view for easier viewing

    

• Contribute a question

  • Contribution text field will expand once clicked
  • Users can key in the questions which they have been asked in their interview
  • Compulsory fields include Company, Question Type, Date of interview (by month), and Location of company
  • They will also be prompted with other posts which might be similar or repeats of their current draft. If their questions have been posted already, they can instead indicate so instead of creating a duplicate post
  • Users have to verify that their question is new before posting

• Question page
  • Users can provide answers to questions
  • Users can comment on question or answers
  • Questions and answers can be up and downvoted
  • Users can mark questions as seen to indicate that they have also received the same question during their interview for that role. After which they would be prompted with an optional survey to provide additional info like Date of interview (by month), Location of company, and role they interviewed for
  • Users can check statistics collected
  • Answers can be sorted by Upvotes and Recent
  • Suggested question panel on the right column

    

[0xwuchuan]

Perhaps allow users to save a draft of a question instead of possibly having to rewrite the question.

I also think it would be quite important to make the text input as robust as possible, similar to Github or Reddit. Such as bolding, code blocks and even styling with markdown (perhaps a bit extra but would be nice)

Also maybe email updates that can be customized to be once a day or once a week so that people can keep up with the discussions

[ddaarrrryyll]

+1 to wuchuank's second point on styling posts content and replies, especially for users who would want to contribute solutions, and maybe different tabs to separate discussions | solutions just in case users want to write their own solutions after reading the comments for hints. Having question types (maybe not the right word bc you all already classify behavioural / technical as types) (eg. dp / array / math) would be beneficial too, and can serve as another entry point for filtering of questions.

Overall interface looks clean, although the font size (in my opinion) looks a bit too big for my taste (in my mind my first reaction was to zoom out when I expanded the image to fit my screen)

Just my two cents, really hope this feature gets adopted too! Nice job

[tonghuikang]

An interview is usually made up of many questions. Do you intend the contributor to break up the interview into multiple posts, and how do you encourage that?

They will also be prompted with other posts which might be similar or repeats of their current draft. If their questions have been posted already, they can instead indicate so instead of creating a duplicate post

How do you intend to maintain a set of canonical questions?

[jiayi1129]

Love the design of the website! In a way this reminds me of Stackoverflow for tech interview questions.

I think one thing that's missing is the date in which the question was posted. As someone who is searching for the technical questions, I would want to know what are the latest questions asked to prepare these specific questions. (And one step further, maybe when the last "I've received the same question" was.)

Good luck! Looks great guys

[xuanswe]

For a behavioral question, the answers are "always" depended on the situation of the interviewee. What do you think if we could add sub-questions to differentiate contexts for the answers? So, the answers are better organized and better target for different people.

For example, Google asks "What was your most challenging project?"

• Context 1: you were in a project with 1M users => you have smt to answer the question directly.
• Context 2: you were never in a big project. Until now, your most challenging project is to serve 1000 users of a company => you need a trick to answer in this context (NOTE: DON'T LIE).

If I am now at the context 2, I think the answers from people at context 1 don't help me a lot.