Luckily our HR is pretty and kind, working hard without complaint…

Interview Routine

After Chinese New Year the job market has gradually become active.
The most intuitive feeling is that the resumes we’ve received are much more than before the new year.
So lately we basically have interviews every day.

Our company currently has three backend engineers in total:
Jinming, Zhou Cheng, and me.

Our interview routine is phone interview - on-site interview (three rounds) - offer.
The on-site interview (three rounds) here means we have three rounds of on-site interviews,
not that we provide three rounds of pickup-and-dropoff.

The other day we interviewed a young guy from Guangzhou,
and we felt he was pretty good.
Boss Xie said as long as the person is awesome, the round-trip travel fee can be reimbursed.

Well, next he just needs to prove whether he is an awesome person.

Interview Standards

Actually our interview standards aren’t high.
But because I used the words actually in the previous sentence,
it means our interview standards actually aren’t low either.

Once before, a frontend engineer came in for an interview.
He didn’t answer a single algorithm question correctly,
and didn’t do particularly well on implementation questions either.
But we unanimously felt that for a candidate who
studied physics for four years in college, and only started writing frontend after graduation
to be at this level was pretty good.
And he radiated a kind of learning tech makes me happy glow,
which was very likeable.
So we sent an offer,
and the candidate chose to go to Xiaohongshu…/(ㄒoㄒ)/~~

There was another time a candidate came to interview
and smoothly made it all the way to a face-to-face interview with our CEO Boss Xie.
Boss Xie has a technical background,
so he can easily chat with engineers.
He chatted excitedly with the candidate, and then
asked the candidate: Why did you think of working at a startup?
The candidate got very excited
and answered: Because my dream is to start a business. I want to see how startups outside operate, and after learning the full set of techniques, I can go start my own business!
At that moment Boss Xie was just like wtf.

Our Tech Team

Our tech has two email groups,
one is yanfa@kezaihui.com,
R&D department, very scientific.
The other one is llk@kezaihui.com,
this email address, well,
oneechan-lovers find it pretty chill.
(llk = “older sister lovers club”, in pinyin initials)

Our tech team currently has 10 people:
one CEO, two mobile, three backend, four frontend.
Analogous to the construction industry, that’s:
one contractor, two cart pushers, three cement workers, four bricklayers.

Because there are few people, although we say frontend and backend are separated,
the work crosses over a lot.
The backend folks also enthusiastically participate in heated discussions like <How do you evaluate Zhen Adang’s article: “2016 Frontend Tech Observations”?>.
(Mainly we’re just eating melon seeds.)
(“eating melon seeds” = being a bystander watching the drama)

Another time at dinner, product manager Allen came to ask a question,
saying which field in the database is the valid time for our active marketing?
(Yes, our product managers also need to know database table schemas…)
Jinming (backend) was confused and forgot a bit, said he needed to look at the code.
Then Jingge (frontend) said active marketing is ManualActivity.
The scene was suddenly a bit awkward…

Backend Interviews

Before the new year Boss Xie said our engineer quota for this year is 30.
Once filled, we stop hiring.
So in the recent golden March silver April hiring season,
we’ve been diligently interviewing every day…

But the scope of backend is just too broad.
Two people both being backend engineers,
their work content doesn’t necessarily overlap much.
The other day we interviewed a guy from Oracle.
I asked him: how do you communicate between frontend and backend?
He said: WebService that Oracle made themselves
Me: ... So, what framework do you use?
He said: Java, a set we wrote ourselves at Oracle...
Me: ... So, the database? Uh, Oracle?
Him: Yes...
I wasn’t ready to give up: Do you use MySQL and Redis?
Him: No...

Jinming and I joked the other day on the subway:
if our interview were to test writing SQL statements, Allen would probably pass, and Boss Xie would fail...

So for various combined reasons,
we haven’t been able to send out a single backend offer this year…
sigh

Interviewing is a two-way selection,
and two-way selection depends on fate.
Fate needs waiting,
so we’ll just have to keep waiting.

Other

This article was posted both on the official account and the blog.
You might be in a far-away place,
or be reading it long after the fact.
But if you’re interested in the positions at our company,
you’re very welcome to send your resume directly,
or come chat with me.

As an engineer,
I really like my current job,
and I’d like to introduce this opportunity to you :)
And besides R&D, our company also has
some pretty nice positions in product/operations/sales.