I received an email in February 2020 regarding an interview. The first step was a recruiter interview via phone, where they asked basic questions. This included a brief self-introduction and why I was interested in Shareworks.

The recruiter then asked technical questions, many of which were related to Object-Oriented Design (OOD) concepts, such as inheritance and polymorphism. They also inquired about design patterns and asked me to name them. Following this, there were questions about agile development.

It seemed the recruiter was taking notes on my answers.

After the phone interview, I proceeded to an on-site interview at the Shareworks Calgary downtown office. The on-site interview had two parts.

The first part focused again on OOD. It began with a few questions about basic concepts and some behavioral questions (bq), with many follow-up questions. Then, we moved to an OOD design question. This was a whiteboard design exercise.

The question was about designing a system structure for storing cars in a car-racing game. The system needed to store information about cars available to players. There were two types of gear-changing strategies (manual/automatic) and two types of fuel (gasoline/diesel). I was asked to design a system that could produce cars as requested by the player. For example, if a player wanted a car with manual gear changing and gasoline fuel, the system should provide an instance of a car with that configuration. The system also needed to have good scalability and maintainability.

Follow-up questions involved using design patterns in the system, such as Factory, Strategy, and Singleton. They also asked what would happen if the system needed to support a new type of car, like a tank.

The second part of the interview concerned the database.

In the end, I had the opportunity to ask them some questions.

What is inheritance? Why use inheritance?

What is polymorphism?

What is interface-based programming? What's the benefit of using it?

What is test-driven programming? How did you test your application? What are unit and integration testing? What is automation testing? Why use automation testing?

How do you understand "embracing challenges"?

How do you understand "DRY"?

How do you evaluate an OOD design?

Do you know the design patterns? Name them. What is the Decorator design pattern? When to use it?

How many types of joins are there in a database system?