My first Interview as CTO In Our Own Small Company

I've got the chance to interview one of our candidate to help us building our startup, to review my performance, it was a bit unprepared even though I prepared on what to interview about.

What I learned was interviewing for General Interview
- Just be normal, like talking to someone you just knew.
- Talk about myself then ask about them.
- Ask about CV and Everyone have portfolio if they're serious then they should have one
- Someone have their own project, In my opinion those who doesn't have their own project somehow doesn't show their passion and I'm not saying those who don't doesn't have one.
- When hiring you need to hire the one that unburden your shoulder and the one that can handle complicated stuff that no one can handle, so let's say we don't have any graphic designer then get a designer not a quality assurance that knows how to design, yeah he's good at designing but his main job is QA even though it's acceptable by some because he can design but for me I need someone who can keep up with our growth.

What I would do when interviewing Frontend & Backend Developer
- What would their tech stack be? Do they know how to PR ?
- I somehow can tell how good they are by showing their code, does it follow conventional rules.

What I would do when interviewing Backend Developer
- I'll ask if they ever done unit test, continous integration / delivery, this are optional but will help.

My Interview

[Update 30/09/2020] For this reason, I tried to have interview to another company so I get the gist of interviewing someone... I learned that in WebDev worlds there are 2 interviews, coding test interview and coding assessment interview at least where i came from. What I learned is that, companies that uses coding tests interview are those that are big companies, nothing wrong with this coding test interview but in my opinion these coding tests are for junior coding fresh out of college or university, as for myself, I forgot these kind of test or even didn't learn these things, I maybe wrong but this is just my opinion.

Story of my interview

Backend Developer Role - Company 1 - Founded 2 Years

From the founded years info you will know that this company is new but it's growth are accelerating. I knew that new companies wouldn't use coding test interview so I give it a shot. In my perspective, this company interviewer has been given questions to be asked from the developers. These are the questions that I've been asked :

  • What are the roles of backend developer?
  • What are my current roles at the current companies?
  • How do backend developer fits with devops ?
  • What is NoSql, Redis, Elasticsearch ? and how it works, when should use it

As day goes by, next interview is from the user of the company. I learned that when they interview they connect things what I did from the current company. It was a hard interview where 1 user asked me about the thing we both know but I'm not that expert in the topic he asked but I think he was expert on that.

Tricky question i get from the interviewer is about GCS, where he asks about how do you secure your assets in GCS? My answer was restrict access by domain which was wrong after I looked for it on the web. The answer was you either make it public or access it by using signed-url. Other Interviewer asks me about multi-tenancy because of my office uses multi-tenancy for all our partner. The technical question he asks is how to show data of partner and how do you prevent other tenant to view or delete data? My answer is simple, we use Policy where we specify only those who contains that data can delete or edit data.

From this Interview alone, I found out what I need to learn more which is : NoSql, ElasticSearch

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