[Interview] Bear Robotics

1st Round (w/ Senior Developer in HQ)

After having a small talk about my interesting career, 2–3 questions were given to me, mainly which were about DB and Web. I have never thought he would notice my certificate and ask SQL things. I rambled incoherently all the time.

1. What is the main difference of delete and truncate in SQL?
2. Why do we need cherry-pick command in git?

I think I got done all the questions pretty well. Especially, I even solved the algorithm right away with no errors and he was quite amused when I saw his face. Even though I had a mistake when I explained the reason I chose BFS instead of DFS, it did not seem like a big deal. (I should have told that it had O(NM) time-complexity even in DFS and it was just more comfortable to use BFS)

2nd Round (w/ Senior Developer in Korea)

I totally lost my mind this round. The interviewer started reviewing my code in Github and sometimes asked what I did in each project. Once I told him, then he asked again what the key point was that I have ever spent day and night to implement and what I have learned by trial and error. I did not answer not so much about them because he precisely pointed out that I manually typed the code to make the service off the top of my head, like a robot.

1. How to get handled the security threat in getting access to the docker volume?
2. What was good in using Jenkins Pipeline?
3. what is the path normalization?

3rd Round(w/ Backend Developer in Korea)

In this round, I could not first understand what he intended. He mumbled over and over again and I had to ask him again since his saying sounded fuzzy to me. Sooner or later, it got clear that he wanted my specialty distinct from other applicants, or something that might cover my weaknesses. (a.k.a open-source project contributions) Unfortunately, I had nothing to say because I just completed my course in the academy a week ago. What could I do?

Nonetheless, this is one of the funniest interviews I have ever done and maybe even I would have because I could feel he had no offense and he stayed very close to me for the interview.

Final Round(w/ Country Manager in Korea)

When he left out, I was super tired that I was almost knocked out. When the manager came in, I did all the same things I have done earlier like self-introduction, motivation to change career, strength and weakness, and so on. And then he switched very smoothly to more technical questions. Especially, when he kept asking test-driven development and its experience, I did not answer some of them because I did not care that much during the project.

1. What code have you ever tested? What coverage do you think your test have in the project?
2. Why do you think TDD is necessary?

At last, he gave me an algorithm problem which is to find whether it is possible within 20 minute to interleave two strings to make one target string. My brain literally stopped and I was in a pack for a couple of minutes. Dynamic programming just came up with my mind but did not have a clue to build the logic for this. So, I just solved it using queue, which was rather non-sense. Time was out when I finished to write it on a white board and all the interview was finally over.

Review

The most important things in this interview, when I looked back, was to reveal my strength in programming that could be clearly different with others. It should not be vague but should be deep enough to talk with them for the remaining time. I think that is what they expected me to do.

Good

• Prepared and finished the interview

Bad

• Did not finish my work that should have been done before the interview because of stomache.