This role has been open for eight weeks in downtown SF just up the street from Twitter for a reason. I successfully interviewed at and was hired by Google. Please keep that in mind as you read. My title at Google? Application Architect. So...with all of that in mind...
They either forgot I was being interviewed for an architect role or didn't know how to interview an architect. I was not asked a single question related to the problem domain of software architecture at all.
I was not asked to demonstrate the ability to produce a data flow diagram, software component architecture diagram or anything resembling a verification of an architect's communication skills. I was not asked how to choose and/or scale a database, when/when not to leverage a cache, when to use a particular protocol, language or persistent storage strategy or anything even remotely related to software architecture. Describe the difference between a persistent and non-persistent connection and why you might choose one or the other? Didn't happen.
There was zero discussion of software design patterns, best practices, security, payment card industry compliance, internationalization, development environment tools and configuration, change management, deployment strategies, infrastructure capacity monitoring and planning, high-availability options and strategies, geodiversification of data centers, [unit, end-to-end or load] test tools and/or how to keep all of that in sync and up-to-date using NPM (when it's down) (...again). That, apparently, will not be an "architect's" responsibility at Zoosk. No idea who's worrying about all of that at Zoosk, I do hope someone is, but it's certainly not this role's responsibility if this interview meant anything at all.
I wasn't asked to describe the technical merit of an existing framework or any frameworks (plural) that I'd built in the past. None of them had seen my website OR my github projects. After seeing them, they were very impressed. But, you know, honestly? Who cares if the ARCHITECT can build a SITE or not, right? No sense having a look at any of that crap before deciding to fly me out there.
This role was created for guiding Zoosk's port from LAMP to the MEAN stack. There were no probes into Node.js's internals such as how it implements everything on a single thread. No one seemed interested in a discussion about how the single-threaded Node.js async model can scale better than using threads and/or forked processes, or when the model causes nothing but problems.
I also wasn't asked how I commonly deal with MongoDB's global write lock, or how I'd go about creating a high-availability MongoDB deployment with replica sets or achieve horizontal scalability through shards. I wasn't asked about how MongoDB's aggregation framework recently lost its 16MB limit and what that might mean, or how Mongo can now emit aggregations directly into new collections.
No discussion was had about load balancing or what sort of concerns that imposes on session manager, or the ways in which a developer might need to communicate with an IT Professional about a load balancing strategy. We had no discussions on how to build a real-time chat system without polling or what kind of browser features would be required to use a persistent connection for said system.
I was, however, asked programming trivia questions in three rounds talking with three total people. I answered all of them except for the last question asked by the last person in the final round. After an entire day of no architectural discussions, I was asked to implement a routine to find the longest rule-based numeric adjacency list in a 2D matrix of numbers in JavaScript with five minutes left in the interview round.
So, yes - after three hours of this - I capped my marker, set it down on the ledge and said, "If this is what you expect an architect to be doing, you're talking to the wrong person. Thank you for the opportunity, but please find someone else." This was after being told in the phone screen by my potential future manager, "If you're writing a bunch of math and algorithm implementations here, [we'd] consider it a serious waste of your time. We need you evaluating new frameworks, finding their value and integrating them into the platform."
I only wanted to improve people's lives and was 100% honest with every person I talked to throughout this entire process. Answered everything except the last question that got asked with five minutes left in the day because, by that point, I'd heard all I needed to hear. Didn't wait for an offer or whatever, this was an on-the-spot, "Thanks, but I'm not a good fit. Please talk to other people."
