Home
The Interview I loved
When I was in San Francisco Bay area around 2016 I received an invite to attend an interview for a possible contract role as an Android developer consultant. For an instance I paused. I was worried the interview might end up as a coding nightmare trying to solve Leetcode-style puzzles but to my surprise, the invite mentioned I will have to build a working custom listview in 30 minutes of time. And I said yes.
At the time of the interview, the interviewer asked me for a brief intro and gave me a placeholder API URL from which I had to fetch the data and populate a custom list view from. The timer was turned on.
I asked if Googling was ok? He nodded yes. I quickly grabbed a custom list view design and formatted it to fit the requirement then wrote a list adaptor to populate the list. Also, I found an OkHTTP client code to fetch the data from API and plugged it into the code. 25 minutes went by so quickly but I was thrown errors when I ran the code. Just around 28 minutes mark after I applied the fix and ran the code it worked as expected and the desired listview was there running on an Android emulator. At the last minute the interviewer said, “Perfect, you did it!”. And that’s it. The interview was done.
I closed my Android workspace. Was looking at the website of the company the interview was with. Right then, after 10 minutes of the interview, I received a call from the Hiring Manager who said they liked me and I am on board. And I was asked to start the day after. And I did. I worked with them on a project for six months and it went all well.
These are the types of interviews I admire and want to see happen more often. It’s easy to ask clever questions that are unrelated to the actual job. But it makes more sense to ask small job-related questions and let the candidate come up with a solution. The interview questions and approach you take to set a mark on your company culture and attract or repel people. So decide on your hiring process to set yourself apart.
Copy & Share
The Interview I loved
https://bhupalsapkota.com/the-interview-i-loved/