Workplace reviews and discussion: 果實夥伴股份有限公司

The position is for a junior Ruby on Rails developer.

The process is divided into two parts: a test and an interview.

For the test, you are given problem numbers

and asked to solve several Ruby problems on LeetCode.

As I recall, they were:

1. Reverse a string without using `reverse`.

2. Invert a binary tree.

3. Given a scenario—something like designing a restaurant menu—how would you design the structure? This question may have been somewhat difficult to understand in Chinese (keyword: polymorphism).

4. In Rails, how to retrieve all the IDs from a given model (`select`, `map`, `pluck`, `ids`).

5. In Rails, how to check that a variable is not `nil`, an empty string, or an empty array (`present?`).

The test questions were not very effective at distinguishing candidates.

One reason is that the company was actually very short-staffed

and simply did not have the time to properly develop the questions.

Another reason is that... the engineer who created the questions

probably was not very clear about what skills a junior should have.

In practice, they cared more about the interview portion and personality traits.

If the conversation went well and everyone had a good time, your chances were quite high.

Based on my personal experience, the relative weighting was probably about 20:80.

Regardless of whether it was a back-end or front-end position,

almost none of the final few interviewees who remained had answered all the questions correctly (汗).

I say this because I was later hired and had the opportunity to observe how senior colleagues actually prepared the questions.

What they really wanted was:

- That you showed willingness to learn and were not afraid of hard work.

- But that you still had a certain level of understanding (for example, experience developing with PHP).

- You should perhaps be relatively relaxed and humorous; being able to chat with the engineers interviewing you was an added advantage XD