First call with the recruiter.

When asked about salary expectations, the recruiter replied, "Well, that's in the senior range." This was amusing because the role was for a senior position. Do they expect candidates to work for a junior salary? What was the purpose of that comment? It made me feel that the recruiter had no idea who they were interviewing or for what role.

Second call with software engineers. The HackerRank task was straightforward but had obscure requirements.

When solving the problem, don't dwell too much on the details, otherwise, the feedback will state that you lacked focus, prioritization, and efficiency. On top of that, don't focus on making your code reusable and extensible. There seemed to be no incentive for that. Just write a couple of for-loops and be done with it. Don't waste time on naming variables nicely or anything else you'd expect a senior to do.

One of the engineers constantly kept speaking while I was implementing the solution. It's fine to talk, but highlighting obvious syntax errors isn't really helpful; it's just annoying because, instead of fixing them, you have to reply that you're "on it."

The HackerRank task itself is something a university student could solve. The key is that you don't really get rewarded for optimizing your code or actually looking into the problem itself.

Focus on getting the tests to pass. Don't worry about time-memory complexity. There seems to be no reward from the engineers for doing so.

Another "fun" thing to note is that once you book an interview, you cannot change the date or time through the link. Their system will say no free times are available. So, if you want to reschedule, be ready to rebook. I wish I had known this earlier, as I tried to reschedule too late and was forced to take the interview when tired.

Considering all of this, it makes sense to consider whether a company where suboptimal solutions are rewarded is a good fit for you. It seems that, unfortunately, this bias in hiring might be reflective of their product quality. If you have a "the earlier you catch problems, the cheaper it is to fix things" mentality, I highly recommend you do not apply.

Questions about HTTP and HTTPS.

How does a request work? What are the steps that occur after you type in a URL and click enter?

What is a reverse proxy? When do you use HTTP, and when do you use HTTPS? Is there ever a reason to use HTTP over HTTPS?

What is a reverse proxy, and what is a load balancer? What do they do?