3
The Phone Screen

The first set of programming problems you’ll encounter will likely be in a technical phone interview, also known as a phone screen. Phone screens are designed to weed out unqualified candidates who aren’t worth the time investment of in-person technical interviews. If you don’t pass the phone screens (there may be multiple), you won’t be invited to the on-site interviews.

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NOTE

The term “phone screen” is a bit of an anachronism that reflects how off-site screening interviews were originally conducted: a software engineer would ask you a series of questions over the phone and you would do your best to answer them, working through them on a pad of paper and verbally relaying the answer. These days, however, the phone screen is more likely to involve videoconferencing or screen sharing software and a cloud-based code editing system.

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