Recruitment Stories - Riyad's Experience at AppsCode

Md. Al Asad Nur Riyad is currently working as a Software Engineer at AppsCode. He is pursuing his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering from International Islamic University Chittagong. Riyad is an avid problem-solver. He has solved more than 1300 programming problems in various automated online judges such as Codeforces, CodeChef, AtCoder, and LightOJ.

Riyad got to know about the opportunity at AppsCode through one of his seniors at IIUC and also through LinkedIn. He sent his resume to the email address mentioned in the job post. Then, he went through the following recruitment phases before accepting the job offer:

Phase 1

The interviewers provided Riyad with some tasks to assess his technical writing skills and English speaking skills. Also, they asked him to fill up a form that contained questions about Riyad and his goals.

Phase 2

This was a written and coding assessment. The interviewers gave Riyad programming problems to solve which included the topics - basic algorithms, basic data structures and other computer science topics covered in undergraduate courses.

To prepare for this assessment, Riyad brushed up his knowledge of basic data structures, and algorithms. Also, he tried to solve 2 or 3 programming problems from each topic. Besides, he researched a bit regarding the interview process at AppsCode and came to know from the Glassdoor site that several interviewees faced questions from the below topics -

• File I/O handling
• Standard Template Library
• Data Structure
• Sorting
• Complexity Analysis
• String manipulation
• Regex
• Backtracking
• Dynamic Programming
• API Design
• SQL Query
• Git
• OS/Networking/Computer Architecture

So, he took preparation on these topics as well.

Phase 3

This was a technical interview. The interviewers asked questions from the previous assessment. They asked Riyad to explain the reasoning behind his solutions, and to come up with some improvements to his solutions.

To prepare for this phase, Riyad analyzed his answers after he was done with the second assessment and, thought of other approaches to solve the problems. Also, he learned the solutions to the problems he could not solve.

Phase 4

This was a non-technical interview with the HR. The interviewer asked Riyad to tell about himself, his strong and weak points, his goals, and so on.

To prepare for this phase, Riyad googled the most frequently asked common HR interview questions and prepared for the answers in advance.

All of the recruitment phases happened online through Zoom and Google Meet.

Special thanks to Md. Al Asad Nur Riyad for taking out the time to share his recruitment experience with me. If you have any queries, feel free to contact him at asadnurriyad@gmail.com