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      Junior Backend Software Engineer Interview

      31 Oct 2023
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Sydney
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Easy interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok (Sydney) in Oct 2023

      Interview

      I knew I wouldn't pass the interview within the first 5 minutes. Interviewer spoke very little english. He kept telling me that my microphone sucked. I connected three different microphones and he complained about all of them. Overall, this took roughly 10 minutes to fix. He then asked about a project that was on my resume. He asked me what data structure Redis uses for its sorted set. He then asked what algorithm would be used to insert data. I misspoke and said the wrong thing before correcting myself and mentioning a skip list (I knew inserts were O(logn) and accidentally said binary search initially). He seemed really unimpressed that I didn't know the answer off the top of my head. Next he asked about Cassandra and its benefits. I mentioned high availability and scalability, low latency, linear scalability and a few other points which I have forgotten in a fair amount of detail. I also compared these benefits with postgres. After mentioning postgres, he asked about primary and secondary indexes, read performance, and considerations to make when choosing a primary key. I mentioned in detail index size, tradeoffs of common data types (int, uuid, string, etc). Also, I mentioned seq scans vs index scans and performance at scale. He also asked about briefly about concurrency and some other minor topics regarding db locking. While answering the questions, he was looking around his office/workspace and definitely wasn't paying attention. He also made no comments about my answers to the questions he was asking. After about 25-35 minutes, we moved to the coding section. He gave me the question and didn't say anything to me. He just pulled up the question and sat there. I read out the question to him and asked clarifying questions about the problem and he just responded with "mhm". The question was Merge Two Sorted Lists. I hadn't completed this question for quite a while so I walked through my solution and explained it to the interviewer, He just said "yeah" and didn't add anything. I coded the question up in Go and made a few syntax mistakes which cut off about 5 minutes from the solution. He seemed really unimpressed that I forgot some minor details of Go's syntax. Overall, I completed the problem with tests cases. However, I'm certain the two syntax mistakes I made cost me moving to the next round. Next, he asked me to do it recursively. We had about 10 minutes remaining so I was unsure if I could get the solution done in time as 5 minutes was needed for the question portion of the interview. I wrote pseudo-code and walked him through the solution. He said that it was correct but we needed to move to the question section. I asked about the company work culture, the use of Go and procedural programming, as well as best parts of the job and the company. His answers were each about 10 words or less. Hopefully others interviewing have a more positive than I did. Green Flags: Senior staff that I'm in contact with are really nice and encouraged me to apply. Recruiter was responsive and nice. Red Flags: Hybrid (4 days in office) 1.5hr travel time for me. Junior and Mid-Level engineers have a bad reputation in being rude (unfortunately my experience - not everyone's though!) TL;DR - Interviewer didn't speak much english and wasn't engaged at all. He ignored my answers to most questions and provided no input. Coding question was easy but 2 syntax problems which took roughly 1.5 minutes to solve cost me. Sydney engineers are expected to come into office (Salesforce tower circular quay) four days a week.

      Interview questions [6]

      Question 1

      Redis: What data structure is a sorted set?
      1 Answer

      Question 2

      Redis: What algorithm is used for inserting into a ZSet?
      Answer question

      Question 3

      What are some benefits of Cassandra of other DBs?
      1 Answer

      Question 4

      PostgreSQL: Can you explain the benefits of a primary key?
      1 Answer

      Question 5

      Database: What considerations do we need to make for a concurrent environment
      Answer question

      Question 6

      Coding Question: Merge Two Sorted Lists
      Answer question
      2