julianommartins/tech-interview-handbook

This repository is a Portuguese-language essay about how technical interviews for software engineering jobs actually work, written from the point of view of someone who has sat on the interviewer side of the table hundreds of times. It targets backend, cloud, and software engineers at mid-level and senior levels, although the author says most of the ideas apply to other stacks and seniority levels with small adjustments. The author opens with a story: a candidate fills their LinkedIn profile with terms like Kubernetes, Kafka, gRPC, observability, and service mesh, walks into the interview ready to defend their favorite container scheduler, and the very first question is something like, what is EC2, or what is the difference between concurrency and parallelism. Kubernetes only shows up half an hour later. The point is that interviewers are looking for two things at once: real knowledge behind the keywords on your resume, and how you think when you do not know the answer. The handbook is structured around the four phases the author claims most interview processes follow. Phase one is the initial chat, which candidates often dismiss as small talk but which actually checks whether you can hold a normal human conversation and have interests outside work. Phase two is a technical conversation where questions are chained off the candidate's own history, so the candidate has to defend the technologies they claim to know. Phase three is the whiteboard or system design round, which the author insists is a conversation rather than a test, and offers tips like talking out loud while drawing, accepting suggestions without ego, and handling stress questions at the end. Phase four covers behavioral traps that fail technically strong candidates, such as being unable to admit mistakes, being defensive about past decisions, or not asking thoughtful questions about the team. The piece ends with sections on how to prepare honestly and how to tell whether an interview went well. The author also stresses that the candidate is evaluating the company just as much as the company is evaluating them, and suggests asking the interviewer about the biggest source of friction in the current team as a way to read the culture. This is a long-form written guide rather than software. There is no code in the repository.