Ask Lemmy

Went in for an in-person prescreening with HR that turned into a surprise panel interview with the tech leadership, which sounds like a good thing, but I'm a severe introvert, so it tilted me to the point that I had a hard time regaining my internal composure.

Conversion was friendly and softball, and whiteboard was a super simple rdbms outer join scenario, but in the moment I couldn't really think straight, so I didn't see any of this.

I'd actually been practicing DSA so one of those problems might have actually been engaging enough to get me to focus.

https://agnos.is/posts/tech-recruitment-is-out-of-control.html

This was my experience at the beginning of 2024. It was bad enough that I had to write a blog post about it.

I once did a coding interview. They had me write a MVC. It was on bitbucket so private repo. They merged my code then didn't get back to me. They forgot that I had access so I got to see the company using interviews code for a real project. They didn't last long so bullet dodged. But it was very silly. I eventually let them know I had access and within the hour they took me off the project despite never giving me an email in response.

I had an interviewer hand me an IQ test before they were even willing to speak with me about the position. Awful experience.

To kick us off, mine from this week that I wrote down in another thread. In 60 minutes take an adjacency matrix as an input, good old int[][], and return all of the disjointed groups, and their group sizes in descending order.

One time I have applied for a role in one of the big companies. Microsoft/Apple/Google/Amazon like big (for the record, none of the above). The process took almost two months, I had 7 or 8 interviews with various department heads - HR, hardware and software engineers, support. I had to take an IQ test disguised as personality test, one more "soft" test, did the homework assignment based on sent requirements and docs. Now, the role I was applying for was a mix of sysops, devops and sys architect. I would be working with the bare metal. I was so deep in the sys/ops world I failed on fairly simple task. During the final interview I was tasked with a live coding problem - "using the language of your choice, write a program that calculates the fibonacci sequence". I was not prepared for that. Usually I could do this with my eyes closed after a night of heavy drinking but in this case I was so deep in systems architecture I totally blew it. Lesson I learned was to be prepared for most unusual tech questions. Ever since I always prepare for both, dev and ops parts even if it's strictly ops role.