Recently I had an interview experience with GreyOrange, during my review I will try to stay as neutral as possible.
By stating my experiences I do not mean to disparage GreyOrange or their employees in any ways. I have lot of respect for entrepreneurs and I greatly appreciate that they have turned their college projects into a VC funded start-up. Not many can do that in India. And judging by my experience I think they are a hardworking lot.
I was called by an IT recruiter through a job portal. He talked to me regarding the company and scheduled my discussion with company HR on a fixed day. The day arrived, I waited for hours but didn’t receive any call. I told the IT recruiter and he gave me the mobile number of the HR. On Monday I called the HR (Deepali) and she apologized for not calling me up and told me the team is out of India and she would call me after two days.
After 2 days I again didn’t receive any call on 3rd day I called Deepali but she didn’t pick the call, I dropped her an email for which she didn’t responded a week has gone by now. I had doubts in my mind so I called the IT recruiter on next Monday to ask if GreyOrange is interested or not he told me that they are serious to hire but currently are out of India, he told me that he would call Deepali to give me a call.
One more day passed again I didn’t get any reply form GreyOrange HR (Deepali). I decided to call her again, luckily she picked up the call this time, I told her that I was waiting for her call as she told me she would let me know about the interview.
I don’t know if this was irritating for her, coz she got irritated it reflected in her voice tone and told me that she don’t know when the team will be back in India, and if I have another job opportunity I should go and join that. She also asked me why I didn’t drop her a mail. I told her that I did. Already irritated she told me that because I didn’t attach my resume that is why she could recognize my mail, which was surprising as I had clearly mentioned all the details in the mail. She then tried to hint me that she had joined GreyOrange only 3 months back, may be only as an excuse.
In the end to cool down things I told her to let me know 2 days prior to whenever the team will be back and if would be available I shall appear for the interview. Again a week passed I didn’t hear back from them I dropped Deepali an email if their team is back? She told me that she forgot to tell me that their team is back and told me that I will get a call after four hours at 8:00 PM. Again this was very surprising for me for obvious reasons. Anyways I agreed to her. At 8:00 PM I received a call from Deepali that interviewer is busy and is it okay if he calls me at 11:00 pm. I was sick of waiting for so long that even if she would have said 3:00AM in the morning I would have said yes.
At 11:15 I received a call from Srijan (Lead Architect at GreyOrange) I think rank wise the 2nd most technical guru after the CTO. The interviewer sounded exhausted, understandably, I told him that I understand his situation, in an appreciative way. Rest of the experience is described in Q & A way.
Q. Tell me about you experiences.
A. I told him my history of employment and the kind of technical experiences I was into.
Q. Tell me about any hobby project you did.
A. This was surprising and funny in a way that after 8 years of experience somebody would ask me about my hobby projects rather than my real experiences during my years of employment. Anyways I told him that apart from my work experience I have experience of reverse engineering the window PEs.
Q. What database have you used?
A. I asked him that I had not used any database but I have used data structures.
Q. What is difference between array and linked list
A. This is pretty basic and quite easy I answered it based upon the complexity of insertion and seek time.
Q. How would you connect two PCs available on the internet to pass data from one to another?
A. I told him that one can use a technic similar to one used in torrent servers, which is to establish data connections between peers by letting each know others IPs and some other identifiers like socket number used to identify the service.
Q. What is the difference between unit testing and integration testing?
A. Again a very basic and easy question to answer.
Q. How would two thread share a common resource?
A. Using locks.
Q. That may lead to deadlocks what else can be used?
A. I answered Messages. (Though this also does not guarantee against deadlocks and underlying mechanism use locks for implementation), I figured out the interviewer worked in erlang and erlang uses messages to arbitrate resources, that is why he is having such hypothesis.
Q. When to use a thread or process?
A. Thread is light weight and process is heavy weight, if more switching use thread if more persistent tasks use processes.
He then ended the interview here itself. I told him that if he is not getting late, may I ask him few questions, he told me to go ahead. I appreciated his patience. As I had 18 to 19 questions.
Following are the questions that I asked the interviewer.
Q. How do you define the business model of GreyOrange? A robotics company into warehouse automation or a warehouse automation company using robots?
A. He answered that if GreyOrange had to expand it would expand into robotics area, this was surprising for me given that their other product is a non-robotic warehouse automation product. Also their website states the same that it’s a warehouse automation company.
Q. Is their product the butler system complementary to AS/RS (Automatic Storage and Retrieval System) or is it a replacement of ASRS? How is it a better system than an AS/RS?
A. He did not know what an ASRS is this again was surprising given they themselves are building a product which does the same. I told him what a typical ASRS is after which he replied that it is a replacement of an AS/RS. I didn’t ask him how is it better than an ASRS.
Q. Are you doing something similar to BigData.
A. He replied that no they are not into BigData they are using machine learning to churn out data collected from various warehouses in order to predict the future. This again was surprising because this is what predictive analysis is in BigData but I think he didn’t know the similarity between what they were doing and BigData.
Q. How is the Brian of their butler system was distributed whether discreetly as in a DCS or central to the network?
A. The answer was but funny, he said both, distributed as well as central. Actually they have a central system with redundancy which I figured out from the way he described their architecture.
Q. Do you have people manager in your company?
A. He said yes. I asked him whether they have people manager or product manager, to which he got confused. I guess he didn’t know the difference between these two.
I asked few other questions to know about the kind of infrastructure they use to manage their company to which he answered by telling the kind of software products they use which was reassuring as it is good sign of maturity that they use software to manage their code and tasks.
I didn’t mean to belittle their achievements and tasks but these are the questions that any experienced guy would ask from the senior technical guys from the company.
My word of advice is that it’s great to be a young hardworking aspiring team, but it also pays to focus on business point of view of your startup. It is the business needs that drives the technical aspects. To instill more maturity rope in a senior techno-managerial guy having 10 -15 years of experience and a proper HR with same years of experiences. It pays to have an HR at an early stage when you plan to grow aggressively. After all Google would have still remained only a search engine had the VCs not roped in a senior guy like Eric Schmitt who shaped the