A Software Engineer role based in Tokyo.

First interview requires communication skills in Japanese.

It was expected to last around 30 minutes, followed by a programming test.

Basic Japanese is required for communication and interaction with Tokyo colleagues, as the team is set up in Japan. Japanese is one of the requirements.

The programming test is to implement a function that can detect duplicate "Job" objects. These are usually obtained by web crawling but are assumed to be available for the interview exercise.

A job is considered the same as another job if they have the same <company, title, location> and job description. A matching job description requires at least half of the text to match. This requires skills in string processing.

The final result should print all jobs, and for each job, its matching jobs should be printed correctly.

If the program runs well, you should then optimize it for better efficiency.

When I went for the interview, the machine and development environment were not set up properly. Initially, the keyboard wasn't working. After replacing the keyboard, the interviewer realized the machine had a problem. The development environment was ready for my exercise after the machine and keyboard were replaced, which took more than 30 minutes. As the exercise was 90 minutes long, the interviewer left the room after confirming the keyboard and machine were working.

However, I only realized a bit later that the keyboard was set up as a Japanese keyboard. This meant special symbols (such as ", +, =, etc.) were in different locations than on a standard US keyboard. It took me some time to get used to the new layout.