This was like an episode of The Office or something. Got a random call from the BBM recruiter who emailed a week before, asked if now was "still a good time" to speak. I said yes while searching the email thread, and saw that no phone call was scheduled. That was the first bit of bizarreness. It only lasted 5 minutes and she said a technical phone screening was organized to last 30 minutes the next day. All good. She emailed to confirm and wrote something about "data structures being a weak spot so I'd really have to study up on those", despite no technical questions being asked in her call and me never having interviewed at BBM or Blackberry in my life. Ok then.
On to the interview, the interviewer was very bad. She was sleepy and not registering what I was saying, like I would give an example to an answer, and then she'd ask a question on the example I gave as if she didn't even listen to me already giving the example.
Questions were asked on memory management (strong, weak, etc), the view lifecycle (viewDidLoad, etc). We then went down a bizarre path on how a primitive array accesses memory addresses (not NSArray, or a struct array in Swift, a C array). I explained high level, haven't gone to university in 10 years though so I can't give more than that. She seemed fixated on it though, so I asked if they use a lot of primitive arrays in their codebase, she said no but for some reason they're a fitting thing to occupy the majority of an interview with to test for foundations. Right.
I kind of had a prediction that BBM had outdated practises so I came prepared...So I then took her up on her own logic, and quizzed her about how she'd execute a join query in SQL on the command line if she set up an entity with a one-to-many relationship to another entity in Core Data. She couldn't answer it, so I asked why she would be testing for irrelevant in-depth foundational knowledge if she has a lack of it herself.
The thing is, a "broad" foundational knowledge is fine! But if you're testing for "in-depth" foundations, it's not only a waste of testing for experienced good engineers, but you'd better possess it in large quantities yourself! No other foundations were tested like OO, data structures, relational databases, Big O, so her foundational "test" was very selective, probably to purposely not expose her own weak spots.
I emailed the recruiter and declined, you could expect more of this kind of political p'ing contest in their company culture. I would highly recommend tech employees who conduct interviews in startups to interview at BBM, so they could experience a great example of how not to interview. Genuinely though, this position is best for fresh grads.
