NewsBreak Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

A recruiter reached out via email to set up an interview. I emailed the interviewer a week before to ask what to focus on, but got no response. So, I studied DSA and felt really ready with LeetCode based on Glassdoor comments. The interviewer surprisingly started speaking Chinese, assuming I knew it. We began by discussing my background and past projects in detail. Then, I was asked an easy SQL question. I hadn't used SQL in a while and it completely threw me off. I struggled to remember the syntax and functions, and it was a mess. I barely got the query done with a lot of help. The problem itself was simple, but I was unprepared for SQL. It was a bad experience. If you're going to test candidates, you should at least let them prepare properly instead of expecting them to know everything without notice. Total waste of time.

It was a one-hour interview. We talked about two of my projects, going deep into the architecture, the challenges, and the choices I made. Then, there was a coding question that required careful thought about edge cases and thorough test coverage.

The interview wasn't super hard, but it was different. It was more about factual questions, like asking for definitions or the number of types of something. It felt like a test. I don't love those because knowing a fact doesn't mean you can solve problems. I got them all right, but communication was an issue. The interviewer's English wasn't great, so I had to ask them to repeat things and vice-versa. Usually, that's fine, but it was tough here. They misunderstood my answers twice, and I had to really spell things out for them to get it, which meant interrupting. There was also a coding question, but it wasn't like LeetCode; it was more about creating a small module.