33 Interview Questions for the SOAP (With Sample Answers)
Simple Object Access Protocol, or SOAP, is a way for websites to talk to each other. If you want to get a job as a SOAP developer or engineer, it might help to know what kinds of questions the hiring manager might ask. Reviewing possible SOAP questions and coming up with answers before the interview can help you feel confident and ready. Learning about the company and the job description can also be helpful. This article will help you get ready for a SOAP interview by giving you three sample answers to general and specific SOAP interview questions.33 Interview Questions for the SOAP
General SOAP interview questions
Almost every interview starts with a series of open-ended questions that let you talk about yourself and your career before moving on to more specific questions about your technical background and skills. The interviewer can learn more about you through these first questions. The questions are also meant to show what kind of teammate you are and how well you might fit into the organization’s culture. Here are some examples of general questions you should be ready to answer:
- Tell me about yourself.
- Why do you want to quit your current job?
- What do you like about this job?
- Why are you the best candidate for this job?
- Where do you need to improve?
- How would the people you work with describe you?
- Tell me about a time when something didn’t go as planned and how you handled it.
- How would you explain what you do at work?
- Where would you most like to work?
- In five to ten years, where do you want to be?
Questions about work and history from the past
In a technical field like web development, your hiring manager may also want to know how well you know web services and, in particular, the SOAP protocol. Your answers to these questions should show how technical you are and how much you know about web services as a whole. Specific questions may include:
- How long have you been building and offering web services?
- How and why did you get into this field?
- Where did you learn about SOAP and other standards, and how do you keep up to date?
- What do you think the biggest issues are with web services?
- What would you change if you could to improve the way web services work?
- What web services or APIs-based projects are you most proud of, and why?
- Tell me about an API project you worked on that failed and what you learned from it.
- What do you think is the hardest thing about using web services in business?
- How have you helped your organisation get through some of these problems?
- How have you talked to general managers who don’t have a technical background about web services?
In-depth questions
If you are applying for a job in SOAP development or engineering, the person in charge of hiring may also want to know more about how well you know and have used the technology. During your interview, you might be asked questions about the SOAP protocol and given work-related situations to think about. Here are some specific questions you might be asked at your SOAP interview:
- What do you think are the best things about SOAP?
- What do you think are the problems with it, and how have you dealt with them?
- What would you change about SOAP web services if you could change just one thing to make it work better?
- How can you tell the difference between a top-down and a bottom-up approach in SOAP programming?
- About the REST protocol, what do you know? What’s the difference between it and the SOAP protocol?
- Why, when, and how would you use REST instead of SOAP?
- Give an example of a time when you had to choose between two options and explain why you chose the one you did.
- What do you think makes SOAP web services less popular than other technologies?
- How do you think organisations can benefit from the SOAP protocol?
- Explain what you would do if the most important web service for your company went down.
Interview answers to the SOAP questions
If you want a job as a SOAP developer or engineer, it can help to plan out sample answers before your interview. By doing this, you can feel better on the day of the interview. Here are some tips and answers to three of the most common questions you might be asked:
1. What do you say when a manager doesn’t like the technical approach you’ve suggested?
Web services are built on a complicated set of programming and communication standards that let applications talk to each other during a transaction. Web services technologies are very complicated and technical, and different people may like different solutions. Supervisors may suggest certain answers based on things like cost, and interviewers may want to know how well you can settle disagreements.
Example: “To solve problems, programmers have to be creative, and they can care a lot about the solutions they come up with. I always try to give the best advice I can, but I also know that some decisions are bigger than me and that the needs of the organisation come first. If I can’t get my boss to see things the way I do, I’ll do what everyone else says should be done.”
2. What do you think the pros and cons are of using SOAP web services instead of REST web services?
SOAP is a well-known and long-standing protocol for web services, but it has some problems. Because of these problems, the tech industry made a new web services protocol called REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer protocol. But SOAP is still useful in some situations, and a hiring manager may want to know what you think about when to use SOAP and when to use REST.
Example: “It’s interesting that each language still has things that make it better than others. REST is a simpler and more streamlined protocol, but I’ve found that SOAP is sometimes still the better choice, especially when security and privacy controls need to be stronger. I think it sometimes comes down to personal taste, but it also depends on the status of the project, which must be finished on time and under budget.”
Top-down or bottom-up? Which method is better for SOAP web services?
In a SOAP job interview, the hiring manager may also ask how you like to solve problems using the SOAP web services protocol. The language makes it possible to find solutions from both the top down and the bottom up. The manager might have a preferred way to do things and want to see how yours compares.
Example: “One of the best things about SOAP is that you can build a solution in either direction. This lets you pick the method that will work best for your project. I agree that the top-down method can be harder to use, but I like that it lets me write code for both the client and the server at the same time. Because the code is written first, the bottom-up method is easier to use. Again, I think that every situation can be different, depending on how the project is set up.”