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We're building out our data infrastructure. Each day we handle:
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- 0.5 billion pageviews
- Millions of events streaming through Kafka, Hive, Impala, eventually Spark
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The first part was a Skype text chat that lasted for over an hour. It was not like anything I ever had before. For starters, there is no conversing through voice. I talked pretty much only about why I chose Elixir for a project and explaining a lot about Elixir itself. The interview itself seemed like a test to see how well I knew what I was talking about, could convey information to someone without experience in the tech, and remain calm without getting frustrated about someone questioning everything, etc.
The second part of the interview was trial by fire of taking a WordPress plugin, adding a new feature, and ultimately improving it. If you don't work in PHP or have any experience in WordPress this is a lot more work than you'd expect if you are like me and go to serious lengths to improve it all around. I myself have neither real experience in PHP or WordPress. I was given a week to accomplish this, but strangely enough my contact never followed up with me after I told him I had completed it via Skype until I sent him an email several days later. I did get some feedback, but at this point I had decided on taking a job offer from someone else rather than chance not getting hired after their Trial, if it were to be offered to me, which it sounded like based on the feedback I would.
For the most part, the process left a favorable impression, so don't be scared to give it a shot. I think the roughest part was my contact was not US based, so you can't get responses as quickly.
Some more details, the pre-test before the trial project depends on the position. For Data Wranglers it is very different from the one you had.
For anyone who wants more details, our CEO wrote about our hiring process here: https://hbr.org/2014/01/hire-by-auditions-not-resumes/