The interview process was surprisingly well-organized and fairly easy to follow.

The first step was an interview with a recruiter (a vendor company).

After the interview with the recruiter, I had my first technical interview with a person who actually works at Agoda and looks for new members to join his team.

The first interview went fairly smoothly. The interviewer actually speaks the same language as I do, so we had no barriers in our conversation. I had messed up with some aspects like the __block modifier and what it actually provides. However, in general, it was positive.

Now, as an interviewer myself, I would like to say that a candidate needs to be prepared to talk about any aspects related to iOS Development during their first technical interview for this position. The questions may vary, but an interviewer will more likely tap into:

• Memory management (probably both ARC and MRC)
• iOS presentation layer (drawing, layout, frames, bounds, animations, layers, etc.)
• Architectural approaches & Design Patterns
• Testing approaches

The candidate should also be prepared to solve some problems online, as an online-coding part might occur with a high probability, especially for Senior Developers.

After the technical interview, I received a Take-Home task, which was fairly simple. However, I requested two weeks to solve it properly. I spent about one to two hours every day after work on this task, and up to four hours on the weekends. I just wanted to make it perfect.

Eventually, I submitted the project and, in a week or two, received positive feedback.

Nowadays, the Take-Home Task has been changed slightly and should take less time to complete.

Here is a little tip I can give you as one of the persons who actually reviews these tasks:

Pay attention to details. Fix every bug and glitch you can find. Fix any architectural or structural mistakes. Pay attention to both Unit and UI tests – tests really matter here! Triple-check your project before submission.

A couple of weeks after submitting my Take-Home task, I had a voice chat with one of the managers. The conversation was mostly about overall programming experience. The manager tried to gauge my understanding of the infrastructure of an abstract company: which tools and technologies I thought should be used and why. The rest of the time, we spoke of life, so I thought it also went well. Apparently, it did, because I received an invitation to fly to Bangkok and participate in an on-site interview loop, which included four interviews.

The on-site interviews were a bit more difficult because I had to switch my mind from high-level infrastructural architecture (like how I would organize a 24/7 system, how many balancers should be used, and how to maintain them, e.g., live-checks) to everyday iOS problems like how to perform proper testing, or how I would organize my project to receive data from two different sources, combine them, and represent them in a table-view or collection-view.

In the end of the day, I felt a bit exhausted but happy because I had actually received the offer!

The most difficult question I was asked was to come up with the algorithm that would perform life-checks on several balancers.

Eventually, I came up with the algorithm.