Phone screen
File system question — needed to support ls/cd/add/remove. All AI-written. Heard back a day or two later that I passed.
Onsite
Coding: LRU, also AI-written. Didn't feel like there was a fail point there.
Past project — they wanted the most recent project, so I didn't bring my most complex one, but it still had some complexity to it.
Life story was pretty standard too.
Design (maybe this is where I got dinged?): design a photo upload service. Merchants ship the item to Shopify, then Shopify has professional photographers take photos of it. If the merchant isn't happy with the photos, they can request a reshoot. I felt like the interviewer and I just didn't click. I said we'd need a component/service to generate presigned URLs so the upload wouldn't go through our own network, but he kept getting stuck on whether a presigned URL really needs its own service. I said it multiple times — there has to be some component, you can't just let a user blindly upload straight to S3, and there has to be something storing the metadata too. He still didn't get it for a long while, and we were stuck on that point for quite a bit.
Then after the upload finishes there's a state machine transition, and you can use an event to notify the merchant that the upload succeeded. I said you could push via CDC, and he asked whether we really needed something that heavy. I switched to event capture instead and he seemed to go along with it — though thinking back on it, if the traffic isn't that high, a pull model could probably work too.
Feels like the market is definitely worse than during COVID. Back then I did 6 onsites and passed 5. Right now my record is 1 out of 5, and even that 1 still has to wait on team match. Shrug.
Discussion
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