Initial phone call with the HR person, following that they scheduled a hiring manager interview, which was about 45 minutes. He asked a lot of questions about my background, and why I'm looking for a new role..it was also a sales call, trying to tell me about the role and make it exciting. Then they scheduled a panel
interview. It was the hiring manager, a PM and another designer. They asked about how do I collaborate, what are the methods I used. How long I've being working as a researcher. What am I looking for in my next role. I think they wanted me to present some of my work, but it wasn't clear from the invite.
I could prepare something if I'd know.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about your playbook when starting as a UX researcher
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at ThousandEyes (Londres, Inglaterra) in Aug 2023
Interview
First a screening phone call with recruiter, next a broad set of questions from the hiring manager, covering python, terraform, git to internet protocols and even BGP.
If you pass those ones you will get a few more focusing in specific topics:
- Coding interview (with a very practical approach, no leetcode questions, more like a simplification of a day-to-day problem),
- System design
- Linux troubleshooting
- SRE mindset (think of agile, automation, oncall, etc, etc ...)
and lastly a face to face interview (more like an informal conversation), which I suspect is just to ensure you are not an awful person to work with.
All in all, the process requires being able to support your opinions and give nuanced answers.
From a personal point of view:
The PROs:
I appreciated the fact that it relies more on work experience than in being good at the FAANG interview model. Also my interviewers showed a strong technical skillset which paired with their average tenure being of 7/8 years left me with a very good feeling.
The CONs:
It is a long process, 2/3 months, and as it's experience based it can be difficult to prepare for if you are lacking in one of the topics. That said that was a senior position so junior or advanced ones may allow for more leeway.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Explain what happens when you type a url in your browser. An excuse to go into DNS, TCP/IP HTTP, TLS, and routing.
I interviewed at ThousandEyes (Londres, Inglaterra)
Interview
The interview process consisted of 3 interviews in total, first one was a short phone interview, with just general questions about you to set you up for the next stage which is a standard hackerrank medium coding interview task along with asking some generic coding priciples questions which were Java related for the position I applied. On passing that, they set you up to the final interview which in my case had a system design problem to solve and they also introduce you to the company's values and more about the role that you would be doing upon successfully passing.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you carry out an upgrade of a ongoing running database system, to securely carry out a schema change and provide availiability of the system and what would you do to existing system entries.