From the sublime to the ridiculous. The first phone interview I’ve ever had was very simple and required talking around a bunch of points that my CV had made. These people may be in a hurry, but are clearly going to assess if it’s worth bringing you up for a RL interview. It lasted about 30 minutes and was nice and easy.
Conversely what I’ve just been through has left me feeling quite bewildered and disoriented. “Talk about something you like, something you think you know something about, or just something that you think is cool … “. Total mind blank, so I fall back on what I was last doing.
In this instance what I was last doing was running a script to compress generated data. Compressing the individual files within directories so I can read the data out at a later stage, instead of as it is currently: one compressed archive per directory.
Unfortunately I don’t know about compression algorithms, I barely know about tree search techniques, and just like the last technical test, I had to be led by the nose to the answers. It seems I can stumble upon the right approach pretty quickly, but get lost in the hypothetical details
This was a whirlwind though, I was left after just 18 minutes feeling like I’d just survived a hurricane, but my house hadn’t - relieved but not sure what to do next.
“What happens next is that I’ll write a number down on this sheet here, and the best 3 get callbacks.”
He sounds like an incredibly busy man, and it looks like a great company, but I’m not holding up much hope. Still, it’s more experience to add to the pot.
Next one is Friday.