A Tableau employee I did an informational interview with put me in touch with a recruiter. Set up a phone call with the recruiter which was very pleasant and fairly general - me and my background, Tableau and the work they do. At the end of the 30 min call, he said I might be a good fit for an open position with a team and scheduled me for a phone screen.
Phone screen was with a SE member of the team. There was some general talk about his and my work background, then he asked me to implement a function to merge two sorted arrays into a sorted array. I wrote out the code on a coding hire editor they'd linked me to. I was pretty nervous because this was my first ever tech screen but my interviewer was super nice and we worked through the problem without an issue. I made sure to keep talking out loud as I worked through the problem and was careful about input checks which I think he appreciated.
Follow ups: what would you do if you were merging three arrays? More?
There were a few dumb mistakes or things I found myself slow on. For one, my mind completely blanked and I couldn't remember if a Java function could return an int[] array. Wasn't sure if I could make an array of size 0. Little things but I was frustrated with myself for that - partially nerves and unfamiliarity with the process, partially because I'm picking up Java again after a while. My interviewer was super nice though and kept me comfortable throughout. I actually learnt things during the interview. We also talked about Tableau, company culture, why I want to work there as well as some questions I had for him. Overall, a very pleasant conversation that confirmed my interest in the team and Tableau!
The recruiter emailed me the very next day to schedule an on-site interview for 4-6 hours. Still waiting on the scheduling. Will update the review once that I go through those. Fingers crossed!
