30-minute call with HR.

I interviewed for a Full-Stack Software Engineer position on the OpenData Engineering team in London (remote).

Standard HR questions plus a few technical questions. I received a canned rejection email a day later.

I would pause before answering and ask for clarifications. For example, when asked how I would go about learning things, I first mentioned (having recently finished a Master's) about going through a textbook and doing problems in it, etc. However, the interviewer wanted to know about learning from peers in a work context. My not mentioning doing pair programming, etc., until later was marked poorly.

The HR person was also non-technical. For instance, when asked about the difference between a set and a list, I started talking about the implementation of a set being a hash table, etc., but they didn't care to hear that. Instead, they wanted to know about basic different use cases.

Why are you looking for new roles right now?

What type of role are you looking for?

What specifically about this job appealed to you?

What have you learned about the company so far?

What is the product you worked on at your previous role?

Can you tell me something specific you took the initiative or led on that directly impacted your product stakeholders?

What do you like most about your job?

How do you learn new technical concepts?

What's the difference between a set, tuple, and list in Python?

What is list comprehension in Python?

What are Python decorators and how would you use them?