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Ask HN: Your most thorough and enjoyable Technical Interview?

A few days ago, someone mentioned that they had a very enjoyable and very thorough interview. The hiring manager or interviewer took them through a system and basically ask them pointed questions on algorithms and data structures. What they enjoyed was that it was both in-depth, open, and not something one could just cheat/memorize their way through. What were your most memorable and thorough tech interviews?

duped 5y ago
I've done a few collaborative code review and pair programming sessions and find them a much better use of time than take home assignments or whiteboard problems. One of the best was given a PR to review with the context, "this was from a junior engineer and you're a new senior, how would you review it?"
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  Modeling from a team's own pull requests makes a ton of sense. I'm leery of using real pull requests though: Some engineers would assume it's a free labor in the guise of an interview.
  - duped 5y ago
    It wasn't a real pull request - just a toy example.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 5y ago
I had a tech interview for an IBM mainframe Assembler position at a Canadian bank. The interviewer asked me to explain certain machine instructions. For each one he mentioned, I immediately told him the hexadecimal opcode and he went to the next instruction. Unfortunately I was not a cultural fit as I was an order of magnitude more knowledgeable than my managers. They were not pleased that the exercise sample code I produced was a quarter the size of what they expected. I worked for a number of Canadian banks and some half took great pride in their mediocrity.
dpeck 5y ago
Given a unique url to a server binary, clock started when I hit it the first time, assignment was to deliver a simple PoC exploit in 2 hours. IIRC (this was about 13 years ago so a little fuzzy) it was a simple SMTP server and the vulnerability was a stack overflow that could be triggered in the RCTP request so you needed to send some valid input first and get a few steps into the state machine. For that kind of work, it doesn’t get much more real or more fun.

duped 5y ago

I've done a few collaborative code review and pair programming sessions and find them a much better use of time than take home assignments or whiteboard problems. One of the best was given a PR to review with the context, "this was from a junior engineer and you're a new senior, how would you review it?"

nobodyandproud 5y ago
Modeling from a team's own pull requests makes a ton of sense. I'm leery of using real pull requests though: Some engineers would assume it's a free labor in the guise of an interview.
- duped 5y ago
  It wasn't a real pull request - just a toy example.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 5y ago

I had a tech interview for an IBM mainframe Assembler position at a Canadian bank. The interviewer asked me to explain certain machine instructions. For each one he mentioned, I immediately told him the hexadecimal opcode and he went to the next instruction. Unfortunately I was not a cultural fit as I was an order of magnitude more knowledgeable than my managers. They were not pleased that the exercise sample code I produced was a quarter the size of what they expected. I worked for a number of Canadian banks and some half took great pride in their mediocrity.

dpeck 5y ago

Given a unique url to a server binary, clock started when I hit it the first time, assignment was to deliver a simple PoC exploit in 2 hours. IIRC (this was about 13 years ago so a little fuzzy) it was a simple SMTP server and the vulnerability was a stack overflow that could be triggered in the RCTP request so you needed to send some valid input first and get a few steps into the state machine. For that kind of work, it doesn’t get much more real or more fun.