Sharing a fresh rejection story.
I don't have a cybersecurity background. I applied for a senior SWE, cloud role. The position requires being based in the US Eastern time zone, since it involves working with the team in Europe.
First was an HR screen, with some basic questions — whether I knew Go, what the most complex project I'd worked on was, that kind of thing. At the time I thought I had no shot, but a week later they scheduled an online coding round with me.
The online coding round asked a string-substitution problem. You're given a dict like {"db_host": "example.com", "db_port": 5001} and a string like "application is now connecting to {{db_host}}:{{db_port}}". You need to implement a method that replaces the placeholders in the string with the corresponding values from the dict, so the result is "application is now connecting to example.com:5001". You just had to write the method and explain your approach — it didn't need to actually run. That part was fine. After I finished it, they gave a follow-up: instead of a string, now it's a dict, and how do you replace every value in it. That one was easier.
The intense part was the follow-up questions after that. What if the data volume is large — how do you handle it? I brought up a worker pool. He asked what mechanism I meant, and I just briefly said multiple workers processing things together, without mentioning the producer-consumer model — that's probably where I lost it. Then he asked how you'd assign work to the workers, and I said hashing on the key.
At the time I felt pretty good about it — I answered everything they asked. Two days later I got the rejection letter.
Discussion
Loading comments…