TNG 

Technology 

Consulting 

GmbH

Vorstellungsgespräche

Bewerbungsfragen

Verbesserungsvorschläge

It's quite a catchy title, but no worries, it's not gonna be some silly company bashing. Instead, consider this a letter to you, my fellow nerd, so that you do not tread the selfsame path wherein I found misstep :) I assume you are the kind of guy who, just after waking up, really needs to solve some differential equation, during lunch, really needs to listen to the podcast about the newest rumors of the next GPU generation, and really needs to read about the hottest machine learning advances that went viral in your Twitter feed.

At the start of the interview, I presented mainly my machine learning projects and here comes my first advice, do not become technical! I wrongly assumed that TNG would match my skill set with the interviewers, and since my CV was clearly focused on my machine learning projects I assumed that the interviewers were familiar with the basic concepts. But except of woah, and aah, I didn’t get any really interesting questions, actually I felt I immediately lost them. Don`t get me wrong, I think the consultants are amazing and extremely knowledgable and proficient; however, they were amazing in Fullstack and Web Development, but it is hard to explain your projects when your listeners do not know the basics On the other hand they were asking questions about C and C++ in the next phase even though I never mentioned them in my CV.

The next phase started with the open question: What are the differences between Python and Java. And here the next pitfall awaits. There are millions, do not start to just enumerate them and blow them away with your knowledge. My guess is, they do not want to test your knowledge as a nerd but they want to test your presentation skills as a consultant. In my case they said they were impressed with my expertise (which you should consider as not a good thing) but they didn’t like that I was just enumerating, dear nerd, when they ask you for the differences they want I quote “that I structure my answer starting for example with what is Object Oriented Programming”. So they dont expect a straightforward answer but some nested presentation meaning that every CS construct used should be explained also. In fact, they use the technical interview as a proxy to measure these presentation skills, which was very unclear to me, since I assumed the first part were I communicated my concepts was the most fitting for this dimension. In this vein, the HR representative complained that in spite of her non-technical background I used too much technical language. This came also as a surprise since she was asking herself technical questions. So dear nerd, I know it is hard in a technical interview to not use technical terms, but give your best here, hold back, remember it is not about knowledge but about presentation skills.

Next phase, programming: Do not, I repeat, do not solve it instantly! The problem was quite easy, so I instantly had a very simple clean elegant solution, explained it and coded it bug-free and tested it without errors and then a strange conversation followed where we discussed alternative solutions which were (according to the senior consultant) would end in unreadable buggy complicated code. This is the one thing I didn’t like because thinking about the wrong way to solve a problem enforces unproductive thinking patterns. There were equivalent alternatives like recursion == stack == iterative but this was not part of the discussion.

Last phase, was the puzzle, next big mistake, again dear nerd, do no not solve the puzzle instantly, in my case I quickly discovered that it was an inductive problem, derived the solution, and there was a follow up question and since as a trained mathematician I know that were there is induction there is a formula so I quickly derived the decisive pattern and wrote the formula down, admittingly at first I had a one by offset error, but I solved the question like in a minute again: Big big mistake, since this was not what they expected. What they wanted was like to analyze the problem slowly, from all sides, even consider properties when they were not central to the problem at hand. So instead of analyzing together my approach which I tried to explain calmly they just increased pressure and repeatedly questioned: What is the correct number? What is the correct number? And since there was the offset by one error they disregarded it. Thus, I had to begin anew and they started to interrupt my thinking process constantly with hints so that I finally replicated their approach which came to the same conclusion as my previous attempt but much slowler. Later they will say they didn’t like the leaps in thinking.

Walking down the floors of TNG I noticed and liked the focused and hardworking vibe in the companies and people were very friendly outside of the interview setting. So its up to you, with this info you gonna succeed easily even though I cannot guarantee that your way of thinking is entirely welcome at the company.

Bewerbungsfragen

Verbesserungsvorschläge

Mehr cases, die verschiedene Fähigkeiten abdecken. Gerne auch fertige Algorithmen erklären lassen.

Bewerbungsfragen

Verbesserungsvorschläge

Ich haette eine Aufteilung auf zwei Telefonate fuer sehr sinnvoll erachtet. Einerseits haette sich dann vielleicht schon im Vorfeld herausgestellt, dass unsere Erwartungen nicht vollstaendig zueinander passen. Ausserdem wurden so die Logikaufgaben, m.E. der anspruchsvollste Teil, erst nach 3 Stunden gestellt.

Beim Programmierteil ist hervorzuheben, dass die Sprachvorgabe C++ war, der Aufgabensteller selbst jedoch hauptsaechlich Java programmiert und, seiner eigenen Aussage zufolge, nicht sonderlich versiert in C++ ist. Dementsprechend enthielt sein Codefragment ungewoehnliche Konstrukte, die er selbst auch nicht erklaeren konnte. Meine Implementierung einer Linked List eher im C-Stil konnte seine Erwartung einer Java-Klassenhierarchie nicht erfuellen. Daraufhin stellte der zweite Interviewer extrem tiefgehende Fragen zu Stichworten wie const correctness und mutable, fuer ein Bewerbungsgespraech in meinen Augen viel zu detailliert.

Ich haette prinzipiell auch eher eine Algorithmusimplementierung mit Komplexitaetsbetrachtung erwartet (leetcode wurde mir zur Vorbereitung empfohlen), war nicht der Fall.

Im dritten Teil, den Brain Teasers, fand ich mich etwas alleinegelassen.

Bewerbungsfragen

Verbesserungsvorschläge

Interviewer sind abgelenkt und nutzen Bewerbungsgespräch, das sie zu keinem Zeitpunkt ernst nehmen, als Informationsquelle schamlos aus. Sie sind des Smalltalks sowie emotionaler Intelligenz unfähig und vermitteln einen nicht erwachsenen/unausgereiften, unstrukturierten Eindruck ohne jegliche Erfahrung, wenn sie nicht gerade Notwendigkeit verspüren, von irgendwelchen Doktortiteln zu prahlen, aufgrund dessen es mir ein Rätsel ist, wie Kunden überhaupt akquiriert werden - vielleicht weil Schein wichtiger ist als das Sein, d.h. jegliche technische Fokussierung egal (wer auf Technologien allein wert legt, ist bei TNG wirklich völlig fehl am Platz, auch wenn online durchaus mit Technologievielfalt geworben wird, denn im Kern geht es trotz aller claims, wie technisch die Stelle denn sei, ums Consulting & das Interview wäre verschwendete Zeit). Whiteboard-Leetcode-Aufgaben so vieldeutig und missverständlich gestellt wie man sie überhaupt nur stellen kann, unabgestimmte Fragen kreuz und quer, die eigne Erläutrngen unterbrechen, präzises Verständnis einer Aufgabenstellung wird schließlich überbewertet. Literally jedes andre Softwaredienstleistungsunternehmen ist für alle Nicht-Freaks besser

Verbesserungsvorschläge

1. Bewerber während der Konsultationen des Prüfungsteams nicht völlig alleine lassen. Auf mich wirkt dies sicherheitstechnisch bedenklich.

2. Mein Absagegrund, den ich legitim fand, war, meines Erachtens bereits aus meinem CV und dem Skype-Interview ersichtlich.

3. Generell war ich von der HR-Abteilung sehr positiv beeindruckt! Diese wirkte sehr wertschätzend und professionell. Ich kann die hier teilweise ausgeführte, harsche Kritik nicht bestätigen.

Bewerbungsfragen

Verbesserungsvorschläge

The whole interview process was a disaster. Four people are in the room with the candidate and I had the misfortune to have three of them to be very arrogant. That being said, they have no idea how to handle people from different backgrounds, i.e. if you are interviewing a physicist, you should not address that person as an IT expert and so on. The programming questions were really vague, concepts that could be looked up very quickly at google and frankly serve as no base to judge how good a candidate is. Instead of paying attention as to how the candidate formulates his/her answer, they pressure you to get very fast to the answer as if you were supposed to know about it before.
I was presented with a problem and tried to explain my reasoning since the beginning but I was faced at every single minute with a non-sense question, posed in a very arrogant tone, or a frowning face, which really demotivates the candidate to even seek for the solution. Anyway, at the end, I solved the problem but was already kicked out to be called in a few minutes later to hear that: well our decision is a no, because you don't think fast enough. What a waste of time.

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