a difficult take-home assignment followed by a technical phone screen.

i was told they have several openings, from the application team to the infrastructure team. if a team felt i was a fit, the team would give me a phone screen. the infrastructure team finally did the phone screen with me, which is weird since i don’t have too much experience in that area.

The phone screen included tons of very low-level JVM questions, like how the JVM stores objects in memory, how a tree map is implemented, and how two threads exchange data.

i learned these concepts from school, but my daily work is building a web platform, which never involved such low-level knowledge. so i never thought they were going to ask that kind of question.

Basically, i interviewed for a position which doesn’t match my background. i’m not sure why that team decided to call me since they should know my background from my resume.

Implementation detail of tree map in Java.