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Position: Java Engineer

HR phone interview and preparation beforehand: I scheduled an interview with HR for 10 a.m. the day after tomorrow. During the call, they told me to complete the résumé, online assessment, and personality test before the interview (about three hours in total). The manager would refer to the above materials during the interview.

Assessment content: Binary search, finding how many 1s are in 11 to the nth power, and one question I forgot.

On the day of the interview: A senior engineer conducted the interview, saying that the person responsible for Java was unavailable, so he would conduct it instead. (Why not mention this or postpone the interview beforehand? Although the position was for a Java engineer, I was interviewed by another senior engineer, so there was clearly a gap in communication during the handover.) He then said: “I can see from your résumé that you have quite extensive experience. There’s no problem with your technical skills, so I won’t ask about them.” (Was that because I scored nearly full marks on the online assessment, so he didn’t ask?) “But I’d like to ask about your views on architecture...” He then asked many questions and sought solutions (e.g., how to handle a large transaction volume, how to ensure data integrity, how I would adjust the above situations, etc.). After being questioned for nearly half an hour, I felt that something was strange, so I asked in return: “May I ask whether this problem is one of KKday’s current architectural bottlenecks? If so, after I’m fortunate enough to join the company, we can work on finding a solution together.” He admitted that it was a problem they were facing and that he wanted to hear how I would handle it, then added sarcastically: “Sigh, I just want to know how you deal with these difficulties and see how capable you are at solving problems.”

Hmm... Was he treating me as a free consultant to seek solutions and became embarrassed after being caught, or did he think I couldn’t answer and therefore lacked ability...?

After I questioned him, that senior engineer, Amos, said nothing more and only stated that he would ask the manager to interview me again.

Manager interview: She asked me to briefly introduce myself. After chatting for a while, she said that I was very capable and had many ideas, but that their company could not retain me, blah blah. “Do you still want to continue with the HR interview?” I threw the question back to her: “If you think the interview should end here, it’s fine not to continue.” The interview ended immediately afterward.

Takeaways:

1. I was interviewed by a senior engineer rather than the technical manager.

2. The senior engineer treated me only as a free architecture consultant.

3. The personality test and online assessment were not mentioned at all, which makes it seem that the interview had been planned in advance.

4. After chatting with the female manager, I also realized that she knew the senior engineer had been consulting me rather than interviewing me, making the motive for inviting me to interview even more questionable.

5. It’s just a pity that Tianyancha only gave them one negative rating rather than an extremely negative one.