I sat down with one of the R&D managers in the company and vibed really well, talking about a lot of interesting subjects about Linux specifically—describing how FSs work at the kernel level (I hadn’t read specifically about it, but my intuition led me to the correct answer, which I assume is fine as well).

There were questions about high-performance system design and how I would design a system that does this and that, putting emphasis on speed. Finally, there was a cute programming question that I wrote with a paper and pencil, and I learned a lot from it. It was not too easy and not insanely difficult, making it a great first interview.

How do file systems work from the moment you open a file handle?