Asked about my AI experience and experience with Prompt engineering. There were two rounds of interviews. The first round was an HR phone screening, and the second round was more technical, but there were no coding tests.
I applied online. I interviewed at TransCore (Ashburn, VA)
Interview
The interview was with the technical lead, and the first part of the interview was 30 minutes. There were pretty basic questions for the first round as it was an introductory role.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Talked about resume and asked questions about design choices made during projects
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at TransCore (San Diego, CA) in Sept 2018
Interview
Straight to in person technical interview, 4 people plus me crowded around a small table in a cramped room, which mostly consisted of random language specific trivia.
When whiteboarding code challenges, I asked if pseudocode was okay and they said no. I asked if Python was okay since it is not a wordy language/simple syntax conducive to whiteboarding, and they said no again. Which, lol.
Virtually no logic puzzles, for better or worse.
The manager was overall pretty rude and at one point started arguing with me saying my current company should have used a different tech stack (note: he was wrong, but seemed quite certain that he was right. The arrogance was mind boggling). But I was just like "uhh yeah sorry I was a lowly software dev and not the CTO of a 10 billion dollar company who decides these things?" Super weird interaction.
When I asked what they liked about Transcore, the manager's first words were "I have a team that I get to tell what to do" followed by a chuckle, and nobody else laughed. I think he meant it as a joke, but it was very awkward. None of the employees answered the question.
In his defense, I don't think he realized what a jerk he came off as and was trying to be nice, but the overall vibe of the place made it seem incredibly uncomfortable. It was an interesting juxtaposition from the top tech companies in San Diego, like Qualcomm, Illumina, and Amazon, where everyone is super friendly and they evaluate overall intelligence, rather than your knowledge of language specific trivia.
I'd join a different industry before I join Transcore.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
In javascript, what is the output of "0 + true"
Write a switch/case statement in sql