Covid-19 or not, you should prepare yourself to hire remote candidates especially in the IT area: Software developers, data scientists, data engineers, DevOps, SREs, etc. There can be a lot of things that may go wrong if you don’t know how to do a remote interview. The worst one is losing the candidate who may make a leap for the company.
I had an interview with a startup based in Switzerland. I don’t know how successful they are but after seeing the interview, I think that it is a startup that is dying to be bought.
Anyway, their HR approached me and asked if I am interested or not. Generally, I don’t reject interview requests because I think it is kind of extra training and who knows? It is a professional life. She said to me “We are searching for the head of data engineering” and “It is very hard to find”. OK, the challenge is accepted.
Several days later, I had an interview with a guy who is in charge of data engineering and machine learning teams. It was a remote interview and when he opened the camera, he was eating fruit yogurt and spilled on his chin. I got the signal that he doesn’t want me in because of XYZ reasons so he wants me to be angry. I thought “what an …” and began to smile :) Then he copied and paste some PySpark code portion to Google Docs and asked: “what is this doing?”. There were UDFs and asked him what they are for because I don’t know their business properly (not more than their website) and it was the only some portion of the code. There were Spark actions based on UDFs so I asked. He said, “it is not your business, your business is to tell what this code does”. I was still smiling because I didn’t want him to take me down because of a temper. Then I told line by line and when I reached the Spark action, I said: “I don’t know why you loaded all data directly into the memory other than partially at the beginning but OK, it is your logic.” He said, “Spark doesn’t load data into the memory”. I couldn’t understand first what he was talking about and I thought he misunderstood the whole concept of lazy loading of Spark. And I was right. He said, “Spark doesn’t load data to the memory” again and I said “OK, I think that’s enough, no need to continue. Open Spark documentation and read it carefully.” He said, “I read and you should read carefully”. I gave…
