MANTECH Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

It was a single in-person interview, but the reception was really disorganized. The interviewers were late, nobody greeted me, and employees just kept ignoring me. Even when Fedex showed up, they got help before I did. Eventually, someone asked who I was, and after I told them, they left and came back, still ignoring me and talking on their phone. The receptionist then told me this person was my interviewer and that they wouldn't greet or introduce themselves, which was a strange cultural thing. Finally, the rest of the interviewers showed up and we started. They were all busy on their laptops and asked a lot of questions about their specific tech stack and its design patterns, seeming confused about why other companies use different ones. There were also significant language barriers, as many interviewers had poor English skills, leading to miscommunications. They ended the interview abruptly by having someone deliver a note on a slip of paper, signaling it was over. It felt like a typical consulting body shop, and it was disappointing to see them overlook experienced candidates in favor of non-US citizens who struggled with English, even for management roles.

So the whole thing was three steps. First, I talked to a technical recruiter who just wanted to check out my skills and experience. Then, I had a quick phone screen, like ten minutes, where I had to show I knew about 6 or 7 different topics like network protocols, POSIX functions, and x86 assembly. The last part was the onsite interview, which was pretty technical, maybe not super hard, but they really wanted to see what I knew. They asked me about network protocols again but way more in-depth, like what happens when you open a web page, how the stack works and how arguments are passed with different calling conventions, the Windows API, general C/C++ stuff, and also about tough experiences I've had. This whole onsite thing took about two to three hours. Everyone was pretty nice though.

Applied online, then a recruiter called the next day to chat about my resume, interests, and experience. My resume got passed to the hiring manager(s) and I had a phone interview a few days later where I did well because I was prepped on Python and Linux and showed eagerness to learn more. After that, I was invited for an on-site interview with 3 interviewers. We talked a lot about my interests, experience, and skills. Then came the whiteboard coding challenge: first, a simple program to find a value in an array (linear search, which was easy). They then asked for a way to do it if the array was sorted. I suggested binary search and they asked me to code it. I tried to make it easier by adding parameters to the function, but one interviewer said no, do it without them. I completely blanked at this point; I'm not the strongest programmer and don't have much experience, especially with coding concepts I haven't seen before. After a long, awkward silence where they offered tips, I eventually sort of got it, but they seemed to have given up on me. They ran out of time to ask more questions and the interview ended abruptly. The main interviewer said the recruiter would follow up on next steps. I waited a long time and never heard back. I emailed the recruiter about having two other developer offers and asking for a rejection notice, but never got a response.