Skip to main content

Not the gotcha I was expecting

So there I was, starting a tech interview... 

I recently attended a couple of online technical coding challenge interviews (apologies to anyone reading my posts in chronological order, this is a fast-follow to the previous one).

To give myself a better chance of success in the second one I thought to ask for the initial requirements as text after I had made my initial attempt at interpreting what the interviewer had described.

To my astonishment, the interviewer said that he wasn't sure whether that was allowed, and that he would be able to clarify any points if I wanted to raise them.

Why was I so surprised?

I've attended a few online interviews over the course of my career, and it has never been about listening comprehension and recall.

Not so long ago I was on the other side of this particular type of interviewing process at the same company, so I thought that I had a solid grasp on how the interview works.

Does it matter?

I was bit caught off guard, as I hadn't expected to need to capture much information as notes.

As this was towards the start of the interview, it left me a little bit flustered, wondering whether I may have missed any detail from the initial requirements description.

Whether I make it through to the next round of the interview process or not, I may provide feedback to the company to ensure that future candidates - and interviewers - are aware of whether the requirements can be shared as text - for consistency and fairness to candidates who may parse information better from a textual representation.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Having a go at learning some Kotlin

What's this about?  The year 2025 is almost over, so that means that it has been a bit over a decade since my old colleague Filippo gave a presentation to the development team of ScienceDirect covering the merits of the Kotlin programming language. So, it's about time that I had a proper go at using it. This blog post is intended to trace what the experience has been like, covering surprises that I encounter along the way. Getting started The programming language that I am most experienced with is Java, so I have chosen to try out implementing some functionality in Kotlin from a recent hobby project that I developed in Java involving spinning up a database in a Docker container and running some queries. JVM version support IntelliJ IDEA includes some automation for creating a new project, so I selected the relevant options to use the latest LTS version of the Java virtual machine with Spring Boot, Kotlin, Postgresql and Test containers. After a few seconds I had a new project i...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Importance of Segmenting Infrastructure

Kafka for Logging I was recently poking around in the source code of a few technologies that I have been using for a few years when I came across KafkaLog4jAppender. It enables you to use Kafka as a place to capture application logs. The thing that caught my eye was the latest commit associated with that particular class, "KafkaLog4jAppender deadlocks when idempotence is enabled" . In the context of Kafka, idempotence is intended to enable the system to avoid producing duplicate records when a producer may need to retry sending events due to some - hopefully - intermittent connectivity problem between the producer and the receiving broker. The unfortunate situation that arises here is that the Kafka client code itself uses Log4j, so it can result in the application being blocked from sending its logs via a Kafka topic because the Kafka client Producer gets deadlocked waiting on transaction state. Kafka For Metrics - But Not For Kafka Metrics This reminded me of a similar scen...
Post a Comment
Read more

2022 - A year in review

Just a look back over the last 12 months. January I moved back to Christchurch to live, after having spent a few months further south since moving back from London. Work was mainly around balancing other peoples' understanding and expectations around our use of Kafka. February I decided that it would be worthwhile to have a year's subscription for streaming Sky Sports, as some rugby matches that I would want to watch would be on at time when venues wouldn't be open. Having moved to Christchurch to be close to an office, now found myself working from home as Covid restrictions came back into effect across New Zealand. March Got back into some actual coding at work - as opposed to mainly reviewing pull requests for configuration changes for Kafka topics.  This became urgent, as the command line interface tool that our provisioning system was dependent on had been marked for deprecation. April   Had my first direct experience with Covid-19.  I only went for a test because ...
Post a Comment
Read more