First Interview at a Tech Company: FDM Group

In the current time, being able to attend an interview at a tech company is a matter of luck. After graduating from my 3-year Advanced Diploma program in Software Engineering Technology, I applied for over 150 jobs. I didn’t just blindly apply to whatever job came in front of me; I only applied to the jobs that matched my skills and requirements. For example, one of my constraints is remote jobs, and the second is no experience.  So, I only applied for remote jobs and entry-level jobs. And, after 6 months of applying for jobs, I was finally called for an interview by FDM Group for a Software Engineering Practice role. I was excited and nervous to experience it, and I am honoured and grateful to be able to experience it.

Before this, I attended an interview at Kinaxis for an Information security role when I was applying for co-op jobs. But it was not like a very typical tech job interview. I only had one interview, and I didn’t qualify for it. Back then, I was only in the 2nd year of my college, and we didn’t learn about information or software security much. We had that course later on in the 3rd year. But I still applied and was called for an interview. It was a very easy interview, still, I was not successful because I was not prepared for it. I took it as an experience and learned from it. 

In the first round, I was asked to complete a technical assessment on HackerRank. This was the first time I learned about a platform like HackerRank and did my first coding assessment . I was told to practice Java, Python, and SQL. I read the job description again and found out that the role involves object-oriented programming. I reviewed and practiced through W3Schools notes and did some easy problems on Leetcode. So, in the assessment, I got 2 sets of MCQ and 2 coding problems to solve. The first set of MCQ had 2 questions (2 mins), and the second set had 4 questions in 1 minute. Even before I read the 1st question out of 4, the time limit was over, and that set was closed. Then, I moved on to the coding question-1 was based on object-oriented programming, and I did pretty well on it because 90% of the programming I did in my college was OOP. The 2nd coding question was a DSA problem. I had a hard time understanding the problem, and somehow solved it. The time limit for each coding question was 2o minutes, which was fair enough compared to the MCQ part’s time limit, but it was very tough, honestly. The next day, I received a call from the recruiter saying that I had passed the technical assessment and was invited for the next round. 

In the Second round, I attended a virtual interview with the recruiter. At the beginning of the interview, he asked me some questions about myself and my location. Then, He conducted a brief technical interview where he asked some very basic questions like what the 4 pillars of OOP, What are they, What is an Array, what is the difference between a list and a tuple, and what does the “Static” keyword means in a method. I was able to answer all of them. Then, he gave me a brief presentation about the role, the responsibilities, the training, the wage, the benefits package and the contract. After that, he told me that I passed this round of the interview and helped me prepare for the next round of the interview. The recruiter conducted 2 mock interviews with me, gave me some technical and behavioural questions that I might be asked in the final interview. He gave me the resources to practice from and explained the STAR method to answer the behavioural questions. I took all the advice and practiced it accordingly. 

In the third round, I attended a virtual assessment centre where they had a brief insight session of 30 minutes and 2 interviews (technical and behavioural). A tech coach conducted the technical interview, and I was moved to a breakout room with the coach, as there were many candidates in the main room. Firstly, I was asked about some common questions like Tell me about yourself, Why should we hire you for this position, Tell me about a project you have done and the tech stacks you used. Secondly, she asked me a bunch of questions related to OOP. The 4 pillars of OOP in Java, What is abstraction? How to implement abstract in code. What is the benefit of using abstraction? What is an Interface? What is polymorphism? Example 2: types of polymorphism. What is the Diamond method? Why does it create ambiguity? Why is it not allowed in Java? Why do we use the static keyword? Example: How can you call a static method in another class? What is the benefit of using the static modifier? Thirdly, she asked some SQL questions: What is a primary key and a foreign key? Which collection does not allow duplicates in Java? What is the specialty of the set? How many collections are there in Java? In the end, the coach asked me to share my whole screen. Then told me to open a notepad and do some coding. She told me to answer a question in Java, so I asked if I could do it in IntelliJ instead of Notepad, but she preferred Notepad. The first question that was asked is: Given a string text, try to split all the characters of the text without using the split method? The second question was related to SQL. Given an Employee table, find the highest salary in each department. After demoing these 2 answers, the interview ended. After a few days, I received an email stating that I was not successful in the technical interview; therefore, they are not moving forward with my application. 

Even though the interview was not successful, I learned many things through the whole experience. Since I don’t have any work experience in this field, not even any interview experience, I was nervous, confused, and excited all at the same time. One thing I learned after 6 months of applying for jobs is, I need some internship experience to be able to be considered for a full-time tech role. And, to do an internship, I need to be enrolled in a bachelor’s degree in computer science at a renowned university. Therefore, I decided to move on in my career for a bachelor’s degree and got admitted. I will be starting from September 2025, and hoping to do some internships to kickstart my career in Tech.