Welcome, candidate, to your interview. The goal of this exercise is to allow our organization to evaluate your fitness for the role by simulating day to day tasks you will be expected to do on the job. The intention is for this to be a fair process - no puzzles, no tricks, no leetCode - just typical software engineering tasks.
Successful completion of the exercise is not a firm requirement. Your task as the candidate is to prove to the interviewer that you can be successful in our coding environment, and you will be evaluated on how you approach the problem and the choices you make along the way.
Articulate as much of your thought process as possible out loud to maximize your changes.
Good luck!
Longtime Principal Software Engineer "Nic" has just retired from his job. He's left this mostly undocumented mess of a repo for his successors to deal with while he smokes cigars in Aruba with his phone turned off.
Unfortunately, critical infrastructure relies on the scripting language he's created, and we have an urgent need to add functionality. It will be up to you to quickly come up to speed on the code, and implement the critical bug fix and feature.
| # | Task | Time Estimate |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Read these instructions | 5 min |
| 2 | Clone, build, and run the code | 5 mi |
| 3 | Articulate a rudimentary mental model of the codebas | 10 min |
| 4 | Find and fix the bug | 20 min |
| 5 | Add the feature | 20 min |
- No AI tools
- You may use any IDE or tool available on the computer.
- VSCode, CLion, Visual Studio (as available)
- WSL (gcc), git-bash
- You make ask your interviewer questions about the code. The interviewer may choose not to answer, or to partially answer. They must answer questions truthfully to the best of their ability.
- Use of the internet for referencing documentation and light googleing is allowed