It looks like there's no Ode interview report on the forum yet. The company used to be Fractional AI and is now Ode with Anthropic. From talking with the interviewer, I felt they are more like a tech consultant.
The interview format was very new to me: test driven pair programming.
I do the talking and the interviewer does the writing. The task was to implement a set in Java.
We started from the unit tests. For each set function, what unit test cases would you think of? Then, based on those test cases, how do we change the set class so the tests pass? The interviewer's attitude was to keep it as simple as possible. No need to care about runtime complexity or memory complexity, but they kept challenging me on what the simplest possible implementation is.
For example, set.isEmpty() can be done with just a boolean, with no need for any fancier data structure. Then we added things to the class step by step to implement the other functions.
I thought this pair programming was pretty interesting. The interviewer writes the code and you explain your thinking, so it is basically language agnostic, and then you debug together with the interviewer to make the test cases work.
That's roughly the flow. There wasn't enough time to write all of the functions, but the main ones were covered, and at the end we also talked verbally about how to expand the set.
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