- fairly good, technical, soft skills, experience, on-site + online component
- with manager, HR and team lead and then technical with the client online via sharing a power point presentation
I applied online. I interviewed at Secureworks (Atlanta, GA) in Apr 2021
Interview
Simple and straightforward, I want to say there were three rounds of interviews until I wasn’t moved forward as a final candidate. This was for a remote position and I ended up not being as interested in the role, I’m uncertain I want to work for a company owned by such a bigger company like Dell.
The process began with a phone screen, followed by a take-home assignment that took about 4 hours—half of my Saturday. I completed all the requested targets, provided a detailed README.md explaining my thought process and design decisions, added unit and integration tests using Googletest, and even included a sample Jenkins CI/CD pipeline.
Despite putting in significant effort, I didn’t hear back for several weeks. Eventually, HR reached out to ask if I wanted to continue with final interviews. I declined, as the lack of communication and respect for my time left a poor impression. The "final" stage involved 3.5 hours of back-to-back 1:1 technical interviews, which seemed excessive considering the comprehensive take-home assignment that already demonstrated my abilities in systems programming.
Given the scope of the assignment and Secureworks' focus, I couldn't help but wonder if the work was repurposed internally—but that’s just speculation. My advice to fellow engineers: Be cautious about committing to lengthy take-home assignments unless it’s clearly a toy problem or you’re certain the company is worth the time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The take-home was to write a Linux userspace process that monitors system state and serializes the data to be served over a socket. There were no restrictions on tools, languages, or frameworks.