Ishi Systems Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process includes a call, an online test, and in-person interviews. It involves writing a job description, posting it, scheduling interviews, doing preliminary interviews, conducting in-person ones, and then following up to make a hire. There's a lot of discussion in the industry about how to make the interview process better, mainly to attract and hire better people. One idea is that tougher interviews actually lead to better job matches. Turns out, this is true. Candidates who go through a hard interview process often find the company really cares about finding employees who are a good fit for the job and the company culture.

There are about 4-5 rounds total. The first round is with an HR who will ask basic OOP questions to check your fundamental skills. The second round is a technical phone interview, which they estimated to be 45 minutes but ended up being 1.5 hours for me. This round covered questions about your current daily tasks, HashMap/ArrayList, unmodifiable collections, OOP concepts, hashcode/equals implementation, Hibernate associations/configuration, and some SQL queries. The third round involves coming to their office for a technical test. It was a really cool way to assess coding skills, focusing on finding bugs in code and adding missing parts to make it work. They review your coding test results the same day, and then you have a 1-2 hour discussion with more questions about the technologies they use in their projects. The coding test was excellent for checking coding ability, much better than online tests like Hackerrank. A few points: the telephonic round ran long (1.5 hours) on a workday, which can be tough to manage. They also ask some complex coding questions that might be specific to their development experiences, which a candidate might not have encountered. It would be better to avoid such questions, as candidates might have faced many different coding challenges. Round 5 is a call with the CEO, scheduled during US time after the fourth round.

It was a lengthy and complex interview process. First, there was an HR screening round where they asked some basic technical questions. Then, a technical phone screen which was similar to the screening but a little deeper. Finally, an in-person interview at their office that took almost a full day, including actual programming, analytical questions, and a team technical discussion.

A friend told me about Ishi Systems and how great it is, so I was curious. I submitted my resume and wrote an article on one of three given topics, picking the one that best fit my life. After that, I was asked to write and send in five reviews of US places of interest. I then had a phone interview, which went really well. Finally, the HR sent me a congratulatory email.