I had three telephone interviews with the company. The first interview was with the group manager. Other than reviewing my previous experience, I was asked about the company, common CS structures (stack, queue, hash table, etc.), and about different types of exploits. The manager mentioned that there was a 'toy' project that they wanted me to do and that I had until mid next week to complete it. The 'toy' project was to write a NNTP app that had to be in Flask (using Flask best practices), use MySQL, and come with installation instructions. The app needed to store previous scans and display differences in port configuration between the current scan and the previous scan. My headhunter warned me that he had a previous candidate that had been rejected due to his installation instructions being unclear.

I spent a good amount of the weekend and my non-work hours working on the project.

In my second interview, the primary question I was asked was how would I test an apple peeler. The interviewer kept wanting different tests, and we spent a good amount of time on the question.

In my third interview, we went over my background. He wanted to be sure that I knew multi-threading, and we spent some time discussing their job. He told me that they were all on after-hours calls and that the ops group required their expertise in order to get new installations going. I told him I was fine with this.

The next day, my headhunter got a voicemail saying they didn't think I was a good fit. I found this surprising, given they were aware that I must have spent well over a day on their toy app, which they hadn't received yet and which was not late.

The 'toy' app.