Probably one of the worst screening calls I've had in a while. I couldn't tell you what the entire process was because I only made it to the screening call. Normally these calls are pretty easy: you tell them a bit about yourself, explain a project you worked on, and have a general chat about the role. This wasn't one of those calls. Firstly, this guy didn't seem that interested to start with, but the entire call was just him asking me to explain a project I worked on and him digging into the most minute detail of it. He really wanted to dig into things that were way outside of my control. I.e., I said this project had to connect to an API, but he decided he really wanted to discuss how we authenticated to this API, which is a really minute detail since the API is from a third party anyway. He ended up prodding me to explain the ins and outs of how HTTP vs HTTPS works and how SSL certification works, and a simple explanation wouldn't suffice here.

Moreover, later on, he was heavily prodding me on how garbage collection works in different languages, and a simple explanation of how GC works wouldn't suffice; he wanted the real nuts and bolts of it. I.e., how does it work with the compiler, etc., and how is it done in C/C++, which was a bit annoying since I haven't done C in like six years. Anyway, I was unsurprisingly rejected. If these guys want a university grad that can recite a bunch of CS fundamentals, they ought to hire junior devs and not senior ones. If they want someone that can actually write code, this interview definitely wasn't designed to detect that. If you're one of these book-smart devs, you'll be all right, but if you're tactical and good at writing code but can't remember all that book stuff you learn in uni word for word, you'll probably bomb. But on a positive note, they sent me my rejection in under 24 hours :)

The topics covered were the ins and outs of garbage collection, differences between Java and Python, how Python works on the C stack, how SSL works, how HTTPS works, and the ins and outs of a duck's a**.