As part of technical interviews, we want to learn more about how candidates can reason through changes to a codebase. This document outlines what to expect.
We do not do pop quiz style interviews, whiteboard interviews, or other gimmicks to test candidate knowledge. We also do not expect candidates to spend several hours completing homework for an interview. We do want to have a shared understanding of a codebase from which to delve into a technical thought process.
You will review the "Kudo Karma" application. This is an application that the STSI Team built for the 4-hour technical challenge in the DHS FLASH competition. It is a fairly real application in terms of how it is built, but small and digestible in functionality. The code is public on github for our frontend application and backend API.
Kudo Karma is an application for peer-to-peer employee recognition. Users can recognize one another by registering messages like "thanks for help on the XYZ project!".
Please take a little time to familiarize yourself with the application code. The expectation is that you spend 15-30 minutes getting a feel for the codebase. We will use this application to talk through some scenarios to get a sense for how you would approach different problems. Depending on the role and level, some lines of discussion could be:
- If we want to add a specific feature, where would you start?
- How would you structure the tasks to add the feature?
- What would be your top refactoring priorities for this application?