Tesla frontend software engineer for factory inventory, which uses Angular. In the telephone interview, a manager asked some highlevel Angular related questions, such as:
- RXjs vs Promise.
- Angular vs ReactJS.
- NgServe vs NgBuild.
- CORS is head or put request?
- etc.
In the end, I asked the manager do you care if the candidate knows Angular details? Because all these questions could be answered by Google. Of course the manager just said don’t care too much, but if the candidate knows it much it could save much onboarding time. Actually the onboarding time is very short if you’re familar with ReactJS or Vue. I think the frontend interview should more care about the component concept, async and css/html/dom basic concepts. Once you know these, all details could be found from MDN. I don’t use JS in my daily work in several years, but it’s still my favariout interview language, because I’m familar with the Array/String/Object in JS.
I was notified to have onsite interview with 4 sessions, each session is 45min. I cannot believe there is office onsite interview in recent years. This is the first one since the pandemic. Woo, it’s hard to believe the pandemic days passed. The people in the future without this experience absolutely cannot imageine how we bare those days.
On Site Interviews
The office is in Fremont Gigafactory. I spent some time to find the entrance for the interviewees. In the beginning I went to the lobby for the Tesla car pickers. The Office is large, because the first floor is factory, the second and above are offices for people with monitors/laptops/etc. The reason I don’t say it’s for engineers because someone is factory workers but they have seats on the second floor. They have different colors of safety vests and hats.
All people work and discuss in the open space. So it’s a little bit of noisy and crowded, but it seems everyone is efficient. In Google you have to find a meeting room to discuss problems, the common area or working area is very quite. No micro kitchen, no snacks, no fruites, no soft drinks, only water and coffee. I’m not sure if Twitter cancels free lunch after Mask’s requisition.
- Tech interview. A senior enginner chat some simple css/html/js questions. I implemented a little, and discuss some idea how to resolve some problems. You can feel the interview is easy. The people is very nice.
- Talk with a backend enginner. It should be a tech interview, but we purely just talk. Talk about my responsibility, some requirement and launch process, some high level tech architecture in my work. But no specific and detail tech question. So it’s a nice chat.
- Talk with the manager. I didn’t notice the manager is the one who had phone interview with me. We discussed some simple data models for order, car, parts. Then build UI for these. In the phone interview I was asked to read some Angular stuff, but in the interview it allows to use ReactJS.
- Code interview with an engineer from Shanghai office. Some simple coding questions.
Conclusion
Tesla software engineer interview is easy and the inteview process is different to other bay area software/internet company. Maybe the auto driving part is similar to Google or other software enginner interview. All the people are very nice. It requires back to the office, you know, it’s Mask’s company.