Interview with GE

[EccentricDuck]

I have an interview with General Electric on Wednesday for a position as a .NET Developer. It will be under their Intelligent Platforms branch.

I'm going through a staffing agency, and from the sounds of it the focus of the interview with GE is less on hard technical skills and more on behavior assessment, teamwork skills, etc. The staffing company has their own pre-screening test for .NET Developers and I scored in the top 20% which definitely gives me additional confidence. Nevertheless, I was wondering if any of you had interview tips for a big company likes this.

Cheers!

[EdBoon]

hahaha for real!?
I work at GE as an electrical engineer in validation for residential watt hour meters in Atlanta. Been here for 2 years. Do you know where the position would be? Do you know if it's inside digital energy division?
I'm at work now but i'll talk to you about the interview, company, etc later.

co workers with ED wooo

[dandymcgee]

Confidence but not cockiness. Be respectful. Most importantly, ask every question that comes to mind about the company and what they do (obviously not related to pay / benefits). Interviewers like someone is both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the position. Also, don't pretend to be someone else, they want to know the real you and what you have to offer.

[EccentricDuck]

hahaha for real!?
I work at GE as an electrical engineer in validation for residential watt hour meters in Atlanta. Been here for 2 years. Do you know where the position would be? Do you know if it's inside digital energy division?
I'm at work now but i'll talk to you about the interview, company, etc later.

co workers with ED wooo

Sweet! I'll be in Edmonton way up here in the frozen north It's with GE-IP and I'll be on a team building applications for internal clients in (to quote their site):
Military and Aerospace
Communications and Networking
Industrial and Commercial

I'd like to find out if there are any specific areas this shop focuses on.

So dandymcgee, you're saying I should let my balls hang out slightly but nothing too over the top

[EccentricDuck]

Just finished talking with a contact there. Looks like there's more front-end work with jQuery than I had realized. Time to brush up!

[Trask]

Oh really? GE is our biggest domestic competitor, I work at Westinghouse as a Systems Security Analyst.

Good luck and welcome to the industry.

[EdBoon]

Sorry about the delay,

So the first thing to note is that GE is around 300,000 employees and spans across however many number of different businesses so a lot of them are almost like different companies in themselves. I'm not sure how much of this will even relate to your experience but it never hurts to know how my interview went.

The first thing was a phone interview, 30 min nothing special more of a who are you and do you have an IQ over 5 type of introduction pre screening. Nothing too technical if i remember correctly besides talking to my senior design project for a while. I'm most certain that a developer interview would go a little different than a hardware position like mine. But anyway, after that they called a group of people to come to an all day interview thing which took 6 hours + lunch and interviewed with 5 separate people throughout the day which consisted of different managers and 2 design engineers which did get a little more technical but just high level type stuff like what is RF and basic conceptual stuff. I felt there was very very little of the technical side.

Most of the questions they asked came straight out of my 300 questions to master before going into an interview type book so I was already comfortable with answering most of them. None of the questions were "shockers" (asking a question just to trigger a shocked or unprepared response) and it was pretty stress free most of the time, just getting to know what type of person you are, and if you are sane. If you have prepared for an interview before as far as the normal questions you should be fine. examples from what I can remember:

why do you want this position
why do you think you will do well at this position
what type of experience do you have that makes you the right choice for this position
what are you attracted to about this position
where do u want to be in 5/10 years
explain a time where you had your back against the wall and had to personally solve a problem, and what did you do
explain any team experiences that you have been in and your role as a team member
explain why you chose power as a focus
explain your senior design project

as you can see, generic is the theme here.

Again I want to bring back that it is probably a lot different than your experience is because there is no GE Rulebook for Interviewing but maybe some of the info will help. Like it has been said, if you are confident, know your stuff that is on your resume, and have studied the position posting and understand all the things you will be doing, you will do great. if all else fails just tell them you know jacob jameson and your in for sure jk

[dandymcgee]

why do you want this position

I hated this question during my first interview. I was so unprepared. I now understand I couldn't answer it. I was looking for an internship for school credit, at a huge company that analyzes weather patterns and meteorology for the majority of the East Coast. The problem was I didn't want that position, I wanted any position, because I needed a position to graduate. This turned them off to me, and their request that I take a semester off to train with them turned me off to them. I'm quite happy I didn't get the QA job, because soon after I found a much more appealing developer position and have been happily working with an excellent team there for just over a year now.

When you first start out it's a bit tough, as without experience your choices are quite limited. Nonetheless, you won't get a job just because you "need" it. You have to want the position, and the interview is your chance to convince the potential employer that this is so.

[EdBoon]

I hated this question during my first interview. I was so unprepared. I now understand I couldn't answer it. I was looking for an internship for school credit, at a huge company that analyzes weather patterns and meteorology for the majority of the East Coast. The problem was I didn't want that position, I wanted any position, because I needed a position to graduate. This turned them off to me, and their request that I take a semester off to train with them turned me off to them. I'm quite happy I didn't get the QA job, because soon after I found a much more appealing developer position and have been happily working with an excellent team there for just over a year now.

When you first start out it's a bit tough, as without experience your choices are quite limited. Nonetheless, you won't get a job just because you "need" it. You have to want the position, and the interview is your chance to convince the potential employer that this is so.

Nice, good that you answered honestly! Now you have the position you want. I've always thought of interviews being 2 sided. They want to make sure you are the right fit but you should go in making sure it's the right fit for yourself. In the technical field i think we are a bit more fortunate (im guessing) that it's a little easier to get a position, opposed to banking for example. If it's a job that you don't think you will like but you just need a job, i think its better off to wait even if it is 6-12 months to find something you want to do instead of getting typecasted as a validation engineer for example

When I was interviewing i didn't have this attitude, to be honest half of the positions i applied for i didn't even know the details about, just wanted to start an engineering position. Don't get me wrong I'm happy with my position but I got pretty lucky in that it wasn't exactly what i wanted to do but i still like it. And obviously in some circumstances people pretty much have to get any job to pay the bills, so not as fortunate to be able to pick and choose for 6-12 months.

[dandymcgee]

instead of getting typecasted as a validation engineer for example

Love the vocabulary choice here.

When I was interviewing i didn't have this attitude, to be honest half of the positions i applied for i didn't even know the details about, just wanted to start an engineering position. Don't get me wrong I'm happy with my position but I got pretty lucky in that it wasn't exactly what i wanted to do but i still like it. And obviously in some circumstances people pretty much have to get any job to pay the bills, so not as fortunate to be able to pick and choose for 6-12 months.

Yeah, I'm doing .NET development, so it's not exactly what I want. But I very much enjoy going to work every day, and have no problem staying where I am until I find something more closely related to my dream job.

[short]

Yeah, I'm doing .NET development, so it's not exactly what I want. But I very much enjoy going to work every day, and have no problem staying where I am until I find something more closely related to my dream job.

which is??

[dandymcgee]

Yeah, I'm doing .NET development, so it's not exactly what I want. But I very much enjoy going to work every day, and have no problem staying where I am until I find something more closely related to my dream job.

which is??

Why moving to Alabama and being a full-time ES web developer of course!

[Trask]

Yeah, I'm doing .NET development, so it's not exactly what I want. But I very much enjoy going to work every day, and have no problem staying where I am until I find something more closely related to my dream job.

which is??

Why moving to Alabama and being a full-time ES web developer of course!

Ok ES Team, he said it, now let his family go!

[EdBoon]

so how'd the interview go

[EccentricDuck]

Well, I walked in and was like: "I'm the bause..." and the rest is history.


But in actual fact, I just heard back this morning - I've got the job
Thanks for the feedback guys!

It ended up being a 1hr interview that was fairly light on technical questions, but they asked a combination of very specific instances of how you would do something in XYZ language (like how exactly you'd grab a bunch of elements with similar classes and manipulate them in each of Javascript and jQuery), as well as more general concepts like explaining abstract versus virtual functions, how the DOM model works, or to list various CSS selectors and how they work. There were several other open-ended questions, asking things like "how would you design a coffee maker for a car?" Apparently I gave them answers that they'd never heard before which they liked.