Publix Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

It was a straightforward interview for a contract role, lasting about an hour. I spoke with the tech lead, the hiring manager, and two developers. Since I have industry experience, they mostly asked about my past projects. This was my first interview after a 5-year job, and I felt pretty comfortable, though I might have been a bit off-topic at the beginning. No really tough technical questions came up, except for a specific curveball about the app builder class in startup CS project files for a .NET Core app. I didn't get the job, but it was a good experience.

I had a recruiter call that was nice, then another call with a senior recruiter who set up the technical assessment. After that, there was a panel interview over Skype. The technical assessment had some really tough Java questions, mostly about memory, Swing, and tricky gotcha questions. The IQ test was pretty easy, though. The Skype interview was scheduled for the next week with two people on the technical panel. Honestly, I don't think they were fully focused during the interview, maybe because of a production bug they were dealing with, which also led to the interview being rescheduled. They started by asking what I'm currently working on, and the only other question was about the difference between checked and unchecked exceptions, which I answered correctly by giving examples like Arithmetic Exception versus IOException and explaining the general reasoning. They didn't ask any more questions, and I didn't feel any were needed. The recruiter was quick to give me the results, but there wasn't any feedback.

The interview process was quite disorganized. I applied for an application developer position, but the interviews focused on infrastructure. The actual job turned out to be more of an ops/support role for mobile applications, working on a delivery team. I didn't get a chance to ask any questions during the first interview. In the second interview, they asked a lot of trivia questions about Microsoft products. They extended an offer, but then withdrew it the following week.