Recruitment Stories - Tahmid's Experience at NewsCred

Tahmid Hossain is currently working as a Software Engineer at NewsCred. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from BRAC University.During his undergraduate years, Tahmid dedicated a significant amount of time to learning various technologies and became the champion of International Telco Warfare (Apps War) and LICT Code Fest in 2018 and 2017, respectively.

This article shares Tahmid’s experience of landing a job at NewsCred to provide insights for those preparing to do the same.

Tahmid applied to the company through its career page and was soon notified about his selection. He then went through several recruitment phases before accepting the job offer:

Phase 1: Phone Call

Tahmid received a phone call from the HR department of NewsCred, who asked him a few questions about his studies, current job, and the tech stack he had worked with. As Tahmid was a student at the time, the HR representative offered him an interview for the Software Engineering Intern role. Later, at Tahmid’s request, the HR scheduled an interview for the Software Engineer role.

Phase 2: Face-to-Face Interview

This interview was mostly centered around Tahmid’s personal projects and involved a lot of discussion. Some of the topics that were discussed include:

• The types of databases Tahmid had used in his projects, and, his rationales in modeling those databases.
• The interviewers asked Tahmid to normalize a database table using Many-to-Many relationship instead of One-to-Many relationship, followed by asking for a solution to the N + 1 Query problem.
• The interviewers asked Tahmid to implement a new feature in one of his existing projects. They then discussed its implementation and how to make it scalable.
• There were discussions on Unit Testing.
• The interviewers asked questions on Microservices Architecture, which Tahmid was unable to properly answer since he did not have practical experience implementing it back then.

Phase 3: Coding Test

During this phase, Tahmid was tasked with building both the backend and frontend of a Movie Catalog web app with specific instructions.

- Users should be able to create their profiles
- Users should be able to search for movies
- Users should be able to mark movies as their favorites
- Users should be able to view their lists of favorite movies
- Tahmid had to use the OMDB Api to search for movies and their metadata

The interviewers gave him an hour to complete the task. In that time frame, Tahmid managed to create the login and movie-searching features only. As he had no prior experience working with JavaScript, he faced difficulties setting up the frontend. Nevertheless, he successfully displayed the movie title and the poster on the frontend. The backend of the web app functioned properly.

Afterward, the interviewers asked Tahmid if he could learn ReactJS to build the complete project. Tahmid spent two weeks rewriting the entire project using ReactJS.

Phase 4: Project Showcasing

Before the interview, Tahmid spent the two-week period learning ReactJS. During this time, he rewrote the frontend and backend of the Movie Catalog web app.

During the interview, Tahmid was asked about his experience with ReactJS and was given a few related questions. Additionally, he was asked to explain the Singleton and Factory design patterns that he had used in the project and why he had chosen them. The interviewers also inquired about how Tahmid had dockerized the frontend and backend, the frontend building process, and serving the backend behind Nginx. Lastly, they asked him how he would download hundreds of images from a website using Python with a rate limit of 1 download per second.

Phase 5: Interview with the VP of Engineering

During this phase, the interviewer discussed the engineering culture at NewsCred.

Phase 6: Interview with the COO

During this phase, the interviewer discussed with Tahmid about the work culture and values at NewsCred.

Special thanks to Tahmid Hossain for taking out the time to share his recruitment experience with me. If you have any queries, feel free to contact him at tahmid.choyon@gmail.com