I first met my future line manager (also tech lead) on Zoom. He asked me to talk about myself. He then asked me a couple of technical questions about go and we went deep into details. We talked in french; this interview was quite casual, I enjoyed it.

The second interview was with an engineering manager based in Israel, also on Zoom. The interview was in English. I was told to go through my curriculum; the interviewer now and then asked me to "go deeper" and to try to teach him something he does not know. I could feel he was bored or uninterested with what I was saying; I constantly tried to adjust what I was saying by reading his facial expression but I could feel I wasn't going to make it. Then, after telling me to "drop it" since (and I quote) I was "not answering what was expected", I proposed to open a project I had worked on in my editor; he followed up with "can you explain me how goroutines are implemented". I tried my best to explain and he shut me down once again.

He then asked me to describe what is the concept of connection pool. I opened an editor and started writing some pseudo-code but he seemed to be losing patience; he was expecting a specific answer and I couldn't give it the way he wanted.

I wish the second interviewer had been more patient (less elitist?) and helped me through the process of finding a solution instead of constantly saying that "I should not focus on the connection pool, it could be anything like an object"; it confused me so much that I ended up saying that I can't do it. His last words were that "this is a simple problem of consumer-producer, you must have studied this at school, this is an easy problem".

I guess I'm not a 10x engineer (or "superstar" as written on his Linkedin profile). Five minutes after hanging up the solution popped up in my head :-(

How is the generic map implemented in the go runtime?

What are the average and worst-case complexities (big o notation) for accessing an element in a go map?

Describe a specific thing you had to implement in one of your projects and go into thorough details.

How are goroutines implemented?

What is a connection pool, and can you draw a diagram on-screen (on a Zoom whiteboard)?

Open an editor and write the pseudo-code of a connection pool.