We’ve reported plenty advice we’ve heard about how to interview for a job at a startup. There are even panel events devoted to the issue fairly often.
It’s not easy, but we’ve got tips.
If you’re a technical type hoping to work on groundbreaking projects, you should expect to up the ante even more.
To give you a leg up, we’re tracking down the people who do the interviewing at Austin’s coolest companies, and asking them outright what’s going to be on the exam.
Here’s what we learned when we interviewed Raj Patel (pictured below), senior manager of software development, cloud orchestration and ServerMill at
Who you’ll meet
Interviews that happen on site always include the hiring manager and the developers of the team.
“It’s very important that the development team is involved in the interviews to help us assess the candidates for team and company culture fit, technical skills, aptitude, and passion – one of Rackspace’s core values,” Patel said. “Moreover, it is Rackspace’s desire to make sure each candidate enjoys their interview experience and gets to know who they will be working with.”
What they’ll ask you
Question #1: How would you design an application or web page that allows visitors to get time of the day? You have to keep track of unique visitors.
Follow-up: How would you scale it to millions of visitors a day?
Raj: We ask this question to understand a candidate’s thought process. Do they clearly understand the problem we are trying to solve? If they are unclear, do they ask follow-up questions? Do they analyze the problem before getting to a solution? The response gives us an idea of how much thought they put into designing before they’re getting to a solution.
Our follow-up question about scale gives us an idea about the scale of the systems they have worked with.
Question #2: If you were given one day to hack on anything, what would it be?
Raj: We ask this question to see how current are the candidates with the latest trends in technology. It also gives us an idea about which domain is the customer passionate about working. Is the candidate more inclined to work in front end technologies (like UI, for example), data-intensive problems or middleware technologies.
Question #3: What is the most difficult bug you had to identify/solve?
Raj: We ask this question to get an idea about what kind of problems they have solved in the past. The identify part tells us about their analytical skills and the solve talks about the software development process they use.
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