Secureworks Interview Questions
& Process

Had a phone interview with a US engineer. There were 3 questions. Then an in-person interview with Japanese team members and the manager. The last interview was with Talent Acquisition about the salary range.

It started with a phone screen, then a take-home assignment that took up about 4 hours of my Saturday. I did all the work, including a detailed README explaining my thoughts and design, unit and integration tests with Googletest, and even a sample Jenkins CI/CD pipeline. After putting in a lot of work, I didn't hear back for weeks. HR finally asked if I wanted to proceed with final interviews. I said no because the lack of communication and respect for my time was a bad sign. The 'final' stage had 3.5 hours of back-to-back 1:1 technical interviews, which felt like a lot given the take-home already showed my systems programming skills. Given the assignment's scope and Secureworks' focus, I couldn't help but wonder if the work was reused internally, but that's just me guessing. My advice to other engineers: be careful with long take-home assignments unless it's clearly a simple problem or you're sure the company is worth the effort.

A recruiter hit me up on LinkedIn and we had a quick chat about the job, and then I moved on to an interview with a lead dev. That went great. She told me they use NGRX for frontend stuff, and even though I haven't used it before, she said it wasn't a dealbreaker and my being a good culture fit was more important, which she thought I was. So, they moved me to a take-home test, which they give everyone. No deadline, but most people do it in 4 days to keep things moving. I sent mine back in 3 days and waited for HR to get back to me on what's next. They finally got back to me about a week later, saying they wanted to move to the next technical interview, but because I lacked NGRX experience, they wanted to consider me for a slightly lower level, which we talked through and agreed on. The next meeting was with two software engineers, and we talked about the project, Angular, observables, and so on. It was pretty technical but also pretty relaxed. It went really well, and I answered like 90% of the questions right, and it seemed like the interviewers agreed with my answers. I felt like I crushed it. We thanked each other and wished luck for the final interview scheduled for the next day. But then, about an hour later, I got a cancellation for that last interview and an email saying they weren't moving forward because my experience wasn't enough. It's frustrating because if my experience wasn't enough, why waste my time with three previous interviews and a 6-hour take-home test? It's a shame because I had some really good conversations with everyone up to that point. It just doesn't make sense to me.

I got contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn to go over the role and ask some basic screening questions to check my qualifications. Then, I had an interview with two team leaders who asked more in-depth questions, mainly about networking and cybersecurity, like how firewalls work and their different types. If you pass that stage, you'll have another interview with the manager and the project's team leader, where you'll mostly discuss yourself and go through another round of questions. Some questions might be repeated from the first interview, so you might get another chance to answer if you missed something earlier. I found the interview to be easy, though it was a bit harder for me since I wasn't working in the field at the time.