Getting Into a Large Company With a Computer Science Degree

Tips for Passing Aptitude Tests and Acing Interviews

Note: This article was written in 2011 and has expired. Please read it only as a piece of old trivia.

Introduction

I graduated from the Computer Engineering Department of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Yongin Campus, joined Samsung SDS Information Technology Research Institute as a new hire in its 48th class, worked there for four years, left as a senior researcher, and now lead a service startup built on IT. I was neither a Samsung software member nor a special military service employee; I was just an ordinary computer engineering student at a four-year university who loved development. I want to share how I prepared for a job and how I succeeded.

This post originally contained the advice I used to give younger students over drinks. Later, through introductions from those students, I gave job-hunting lectures at my alma mater, Soongsil University, Seoil University, and others. This is a brief reorganization of the material I used there. The students I coached based on this content all ended up getting jobs at large companies.

Now that I have left a large company too, and the information I have will become less useful as time goes on, I am publishing it here. I want to encourage job seekers going through one of the hardest periods of their lives, and to offer the reassurance that if you prepare a little more and endure a little more than others during those hard times, you can benefit from that for the rest of your life.

Job Study Groups

Job study groups are not something you do with classmates from the same school or with close friends. Only do that if you are truly out of time, or at worst.

There is only one way to choose a job study group: it must be a group of people who are better than you. To make that possible, you need to give the other members of the group the sense that you are someone of value. If you go to a study group for the first time and do not see many people better than you, and no one seems to know what to do, you should look for another group as soon as possible.

So when you are looking for a study group, do not focus on just one. Compare at least two groups at the same time and attend both. Choose the better one, leave the one you think you do not need, and keep looking for another better one. That amount of time investment is exactly why people say the earlier you start preparing for a job, the better.

Job Camps and Job Fairs

Good study groups are useful because they motivate and stimulate one another, but because everyone there is still a job seeker, it is hard to give and receive truly useful feedback. They may review resumes and cover letters, run mock personality interviews, PT interviews, and group discussions, but often everyone just ends up guessing what the right answer is supposed to be.

To make up for that, you should actively attend job camps and job fairs run inside and outside your school. These days, job camps at universities even include overnight stays, with lectures from job experts, resume reviews, mock interviews, and feedback. At events like these, you need to experience a complete mental breakdown in advance if you do not want to collapse in a real company interview later. The job process is about hearing experts' opinions, staying as objective as possible about yourself, and finding your own appeal.

Korean students tend to obsess over grades and TOEIC scores from elementary school through university, so very few have ever really thought about what kind of work they want to do or what kind of person they are. But job hunting is a process of finding out who you are, why you want to do this work, and what strengths you can bring to a company. So you need to go through confusion quickly, hit a wall quickly, recover quickly, and then make both the self you know and the self others see into something appealing.

SSAT

These days, almost every large company gives aptitude tests. In Samsung's case, there is effectively no document screening, and if you pass the SSAT you go straight to the interview, so the SSAT is very important. I believe they usually hire a little over twice the final number needed, so the competition is only about two to one. If you look around the interview room, there are all kinds of people there, but it means that if you can beat just the person next to you, you can get into a large company.

Aptitude tests are broadly divided into two parts: IQ and general knowledge, and personality/aptitude. The IQ and general knowledge part contains questions that smart people are expected to solve well. But one thing is certain: the more you practice this kind of test, the better you get at it.

Some people say aptitude tests are not something you can study for and that you either pass when you show up or you do not. That is absolutely not true. Geometry nets and sequence prediction IQ questions can be solved much faster if you work through even one SSAT book properly. Even if you are going to guess, you will score much better if you have gone through a book first. It may be difficult to raise your score quickly on Chinese characters or general knowledge, but for engineering students the weighting of Chinese characters is low and the parts that require logical reasoning carry more weight, so a strategic approach is sometimes necessary.

Personality and Aptitude Tests

Many people also find the personality and aptitude section difficult because, from a student's perspective, it feels like there is no answer. But there is an answer there too. My advice is as follows.

First, your answers must be consistent. When there are around 200 questions, if you answer them carelessly, you can easily give different answers to questions that are really asking the same thing. That makes it hard to understand your tendencies and makes you seem dishonest, which is a minus. To prevent that, answer quickly and then double-check that you did not fall into any traps. If you do it the way I describe below, you will have enough time.

Second, be honest, but decide on your own personal concept in advance. My concept was leadership and technical orientation. When asked whether I was better at leading others or supporting them, I chose the answer that I was excellent at leading. This will differ depending on the person's traits, but you should think through your tendencies in advance and turn them into a concept so that you can answer quickly and consistently without getting flustered. Questions like "Do you prefer work or friends?" are also the kind you can answer immediately if you have thought them through beforehand.

Third, the priority order is customer > company > me. In consulting work I found that many students did not know this simple, eternal truth. First, and in fact at the very top, is the customer. Then the company. Last is me. Aptitude tests always include ambiguous questions about employee values, and not just one or two, but a whole pile of them. For example: you are on a business trip in the provinces, the customer makes an unreasonable request, and you cannot reach your direct manager at headquarters. What would you do? Decide the order in your head first. Once again, customer > company > me and family. You can think of any other answer as essentially wrong. Sometimes an option says you should go beyond your direct manager and report to a vice president, but that is not a correct answer because it ignores the reporting structure.

Interviews

Some students only prepare for the interviews at companies they really want to join, but that is a foolish thing to do. The more interviews you do, the less nervous you become and the better you get. Even for companies you do not really want, you should submit your resume and actually go through the interview process, because then you will be able to say everything you want in the interviews for the company you truly want later. In my experience, desire and nervousness are proportional. The better the company, the more nervous you get.

Presentation Interview

In a presentation interview, you are given two questions, choose one, spend 20 minutes organizing your thoughts, present for 10 minutes, and then take questions. Usually one question requires technical depth and the other is something a non-major can approach. There is no rule that you must choose a particular one. You should choose the question where you know at least one more thing and can say at least one more thing. Some people think that choosing a non-major question when you are a major is a disadvantage, but it does not seem to matter much, so it is better to choose the one you are more confident about.

Then you need to think about how to approach the chosen question. The absolute rule here is to make one or two points that others did not make. If there are 100 interviewees in a day, the interviewers have to listen to 100 versions of the same answer over and over. That is exhausting, and after a while they may get confused and not even remember who said what.

The strategy here is whether you can mention points that others probably did not mention. For example, suppose the question is whether you should build a core module yourself or buy a well-known solution. In that case, you should not insist from the start that one of those two is the only answer. You need to compare the pros and cons of both options thoroughly, and then explain that, for you, one option seems better because its advantages outweigh its disadvantages. You should not start by saying one is the answer.

But sometimes the question is obvious to everyone. In those cases, you need a thesis-antithesis-synthesis approach. Do not just state the obvious reason for the answer and stop there. You also need to add that this choice could create some small problem, and explain how you would solve it. Only then can you say you gave a competitive answer. Of course, if you cannot see a meaningful differentiator, do not worry too much. Many people ruin interviews because of excessive nervousness, so if you do reasonably well, your chances are very high. Remembering that can help you stay calm.

Personality Interview

Students without interview experience often misunderstand personality interviews. They think the interview is only about your character. So they focus on your upbringing, how much empathy you have, and other personality-related things. That is not how you should prepare.

The answer becomes clearer when you look at who usually sits on the interviewer side. In PT interviews, working-level staff such as section chiefs or senior managers are there to judge the candidate's technical depth. In personality interviews, people at a higher rank, such as directors or team leaders, tend to participate. But those team leaders did not fall from the sky. They all got there by doing development work with a technical foundation and being recognized for their ability. So why would they ask only boring personality questions? They will naturally want to know how much development ability the person has and how deep their knowledge is, because this is someone they may work with in the same company.

So personality interviews are actually a kind of technical interview. If you do not prepare this way, you will end up saying nothing about your technical ability and only telling pleasant stories about yourself. That is not a good direction for the conversation. I have never seen anyone get hired after singing or dancing in an interview room.

Discussion Interview

In a discussion interview, the only thing you need to maintain is an attitude of listening. Do not try to attack anyone. If you start from the premise that people's opinions differ and show that you are listening well, you will at least do reasonably well. The moment you rush to state a strong opinion because you are anxious about being overpowered, you become everyone's enemy. You need to understand the panel's flow of opinions accurately, and even if something sounds absurd, you should politely ask, "How about this view?" If you answer off-topic or fail to answer properly when the interviewer asks what the other panelist said after the discussion, you will lose a lot of points.

Interview Killer Moves

Here are the most common types of interview questions.

• What did you focus on during college?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• What is something you think no one can beat you at?
• What was the happiest moment of your life so far?
• Have you ever been frustrated?

Trying to memorize dozens of separate answers to these question types is close to suicidal. Once you get nervous, memorized answers show or slip away. So I recommend building your own success stories that you can use to answer anything.

If 4 or 5 candidates are interviewed for an hour, your speaking time is only about 10 to 15 minutes, and even if you get many questions, you will usually only be asked three. How you present yourself in those three opportunities determines whether you pass. For engineering roles, you can naturally answer any question with a development-related story. The only requirement is that the story must be fully formed.

The Five Stages of an Interview Answer: Beginning -> Development -> Crisis -> Climax -> Resolution

How do you make a story complete? Make sure your short personal experience contains all five stages: beginning, development, crisis, climax, and resolution. For example, if you majored in computer engineering, you probably worked on a personal or team project. If you shape your experience into a structure like the one below, you can handle almost any question.

In my case, during summer break in my third year, I saw Afreeca from Nowcom and was so shocked that I started a personal project to build an exact copycat. It looked so cool. I immediately began reverse-engineering Afreeca's ActiveX control, studied RFC documents related to H.264, built a Windows screen-capture control based on DirectX, created a video encoder/decoder, and even got it to send and receive UDP packets, all by myself over the summer. Of course, I published the source code on my blog, got a good response, and even years later people were still emailing me about that code.

If you apply that story to an interview answer,

I had about 10 project stories shaped into interview-ready episodes like this, and I chose about five that I thought the company would like before I went in. In every group there are usually one or two people who enter the interview without enough technical depth or without being prepared to express themselves well. Watching their answers gave me even more confidence, and I remember entering the interview feeling strong.

What if you think you have no stories worth telling? Do not worry. If you are a proper computer engineering graduate, then when you look back over your four years, you are bound to find stories that can be turned into episodes. Maybe you had conflicts with teammates during a team project and resolved them, maybe you struggled in an algorithms class but studied like crazy after military service and retook it to get a good grade, maybe you realized your skills were lacking and got a certificate or went to an academy. Any story in which you grew through persistence and effort can be reborn as a complete episode.

A team leader who had been an interviewer once complained that when candidates were asked about the hardest thing they had experienced in life, they always talked about studying abroad for language training. From the students' perspective, that was probably the hardest memory they had, so they spoke about it earnestly, but from the company's perspective it did not appeal to practical work at all. If you want to become a developer and join a development company, it is much more effective to present yourself through development stories.

Closing

So far I have briefly written a few tips on getting into a large company as a developer, based on what I experienced myself and shared with younger students. Everything I wrote here is only my own opinion, and it may include incorrect information or things that are simply not true.

Even now, I see many students who do not have access to proper information about how to prepare for jobs or how to approach the process, so I am leaving behind my own experience here. If you read this and have questions, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email and I will answer sincerely.

Thank you.