This was probably the worst interview experience I have had in my 11-year career. For the record, I am a Lead at my current company and was promoted to Lead within the first 6 months (probation period) of my first job in Australia. This was without any prior local experience in AU. If you know of anyone who has been promoted within their probation period, please message me personally. My company is not a small, 4-employee organization; we have 600 people across four different continents.

I was shortlisted within a week of applying, as 99% of my skills matched the job requirements. I received a call from HR, where she asked a few basic technical screening questions related to testing. These questions were pre-written by the test team, of course. I answered each one correctly, and my application was immediately forwarded to the next round: an online screenshare/CodePair (from HackerRank) technical coding interview session with the Test Lead and one other tester. This all happened within a week, and I was pleasantly surprised at the pace my application moved forward and the response time, considering the recruiters and HR must go through hundreds of resumes daily.

Now, for the hilarious part. Instead of asking questions related to testing or the tech tools used at Canva, or those mentioned in the job ad, they asked me to write a program to ‘Find the number of palindromes in a given string.’ Would you believe it? Come on, Canva! For someone with 11 years of experience, who decides on tech and tools, builds them from scratch, and then tests and deploys them, you ask elementary questions from programming exercise books, like ‘Check if a given number is even or odd?’ or ‘Print prime numbers between 1 to 100?’ You have got to be kidding me.

Do you seriously think writing a program to find palindromes is the best way to test a candidate’s testing ability? Solutions to these can be found within two minutes if you have ever heard of something called Google. But the testing mindset, test strategies, and planning acumen are not possessed by palindrome finders. I can give the interviewers 100 other programs that I bet they can’t solve in days, and that doesn’t mean they are not good at their job.

Writing some code is not the only way to test if a candidate can do the job. Screen the candidate on the job you want them to perform after they come on board.

I am sure your QA engineers don’t write programs to find palindromes or test if a number is even/odd in their day-to-day job. Or, I may be wrong?

I wasted one hour of my precious time interviewing with Canva.

Write a program to print all the palindromes in a given string.