My Shitty Australian Tech Interview

The last time I was hired was in 2021 in the US. Back in those good old days, before I could even finish saying “Hi, I ex-”, recruiters would be hounding me to interview for their company. Sure, I’d have my fair share of rejections, but every time I’ve applied for work since graduating back in 2015, I’ve always easily ended up with multiple juicy offers to pick from.

Two years later and an ocean away, I found myself saying “Hi, I exist. I am looking for a job now. Umm… hello? HELLO?!” without even the tiniest nibble from a recruiter. I eventually finally land a phone screen with a large Australian company. The interviewer starts asking what feels to me like trivia questions that I could always just Google if I ever needed to, and then asks me how I would implement a logging microservice for a payment microservice, so as to prevent the payment microservice from double charging customers in its attempts to resend failed transactions to an external payment gateway.

I silently intuited that one way or another, you’re going to have to ask the bank every time before you retry the request on your end. Being unfamiliar with how payment service APIs usually work, I said that if the bank allowed for some way to refer to transactions with our own ID — or if not, perhaps if they gave us a transaction ID for a new transaction, we could store it on our end with our order data — then we could ask the bank before every request whether or not that transaction ID has already been fulfilled, and only proceed if it hasn’t. The interviewer asked for clarification on how this would prevent double transactions, and I replied that if the external API had such a feature, we can just ask them to check for us with the transaction ID we provided, right? My reasoning, which I didn’t say because I assumed it would be a discussion, was that the source of truth here is ultimately always going to be that external bank, and there’s no way to absolutely guarantee that your microservice doesn’t fail right in between successfully sending a transaction request over and logging the success of that request.

The interviewer paused, scoffed, and finally said, “Okay, I think we can end this phone screen early. Do you have any questions for us?” I followed through with the formalities, but I was incensed at the time. Even if I had just said the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of in your whole life, why wouldn’t you at least poke holes at the stupid solution I proposed? If I had completely misunderstood the question (what does any of this have to do with microservices?), why wouldn’t you clarify what it was that you actually wanted? Why wouldn’t you give me anything to defend myself with? The cherry on top, as I found out later from a friend, is that actual banks do in fact implement idempotency keys for exactly this purpose, so I was clearly on the right track despite knowing nothing about payment APIs.

I have never been interviewed in that way in the US, so that was the first real culture shock to me. In the end, I got one more phone screen from another company, and one full round from a third company. There is clearly a mismatch in communication styles: I would repeatedly ask, “Does that sound reasonable to you?” after I suggest something to make sure I’m going down the right track, the Australian interviewers will politely nod and say “Sure,” and then go on to recommend a rejection for me anyways. I learned nothing from these interviews, except for the one bit of feedback that one recruiter was able to tell me about how my answers on my past experience were too “surface-level.” Why wouldn’t you simply ask me what further details you wished to know? But fair enough, perhaps I should adopt a more STAR approach to interviews in the future.

(I haven’t been interviewing for US companies for a little while now, because it seems surprisingly few of them are actually okay with fully remote work in APAC timezones. As such, I don’t know if American tech interview culture has changed much, or how I’d fare in American interviews today after all the layoffs I’ve heard about.)