McGraw Hill Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

First I talked to a recruiter, who had a list of basic tech questions to screen me. Then there was a 1-hour tech interview with a lead or principal engineer. This was followed by a 2-hour tech panel interview with other leads and the hiring manager. One person on the panel was really bad at interviewing and should be trained by the company. This person asked me to solve a Java async problem, and when I used a different tool than expected, they got uneasy and tried to criticize my solution. They spent a lot of time nitpicking instead of moving on, and another interviewer had to step in. The interviewer then laughed at my solution, turned off their camera, and left without a word, which was incredibly rude. I lost my confidence after that but continued answering questions for the rest of the 2 hours. I then told the recruiter I didn't like the interview and that the interviewer needs to learn how to conduct interviews. I've interviewed over 500 people and never behaved that way.

A recruiter reached out to me, then I had a phone interview. After that, I was invited for an onsite interview. The onsite seemed to be going well, and I thought I was a great fit given my 10 years of PHP and 3 years of Angular experience, which matched their tech stack. However, the interview took a turn when the Site Reliability Engineer started asking me about microservices. I struggled with these questions because I felt PHP wasn't suited for microservices, and my PHP experience was with frameworks like Drupal, Magento, CodeIgniter, and Symfony, which weren't what they were looking for. Since then, I've been learning about microservices, particularly .NET Core, and I've come to believe the SRE I spoke with didn't fully understand microservices themselves, as they seemed to be deploying monolithic PHP code on a single server. I also felt an immediate negative vibe from the SRE from the moment we met.

After applying online, I heard back within a week. First, I had a screening call with HR, followed by an interview with the hiring manager over the phone. Then I came in for an onsite interview that lasted a couple of hours. The process wrapped up with one last phone chat with HR again. It all went pretty smoothly, and the people I talked to were great - really nice, helpful, and encouraging.