Mak Andrlon
Remote (located in Melbourne, Aus)
Low-level / back-end
Via linkedin: /in/mak-andrlon/
Brief description
This one’s all about the interview results, where Mak racked up one of the strongest generalist performances we’ve seen to date. He’s a rare example of an extremely deep low-level expert who can shift gears back up to high-level code without skipping a beat, perhaps because he’s actually worked on the interface between the two before (one of his projects is a Lua-to-C++ interface).
There wasn’t really anything we could characterize as weak or even just “OK” on our interview, and there were points (especially during the low-level portion) where he was more-or-less reading off our rubric unprompted.
While his non-academic resume is pretty short (only one year of formal experience, though it was at Google), he has done some producty/business-computing-y work as well, notably running data tools for Etsy vendors for some years.
What they're looking for
Mak is looking for a highly technical role with good work-life balance (this is not something he's willing to bend on). He'd like to avoid finance, crypto, defense, gambling, and adult-related roles.
Interview results
If you're new to our interview, here's what you need to know:
It's a 90 minute call with one of our senior engineers. (Here's what's on it.)
Green scores = up to the bar of early-stage silicon valley startups (this is a high bar).
Any green score is a recommendation for that area.
A "good" score is approximately 90th percentile.
A "great" score is approximately 95th percentile.
An "exceptional" score (extremely rare) is approximately 99th+ percentile.
Remember that if someone appears here at all, we recommend them.
Overall:
Great
Section scores:
Timed coding
Good
Good speed, high code quality, and no real complaints to offer here.
Concepts - CS/Algos
Good
Quite good, despite still being somehow still the weakest of the three conceptual sections.
...Full-stack web
Great
Excellent, and all the more excellent for how unusual it is for someone focused on low-level details to be able to shift gears upward so sharply. There are a lot of very senior full-stack engs who can't deliver half this performance.
...Low-level & security
Great
Excellent, bordering on spectacular. In a few cases, he was more or less checking off every bullet on our rubric totally unprompted. Our interviewer - who did not know his background, since we conduct interviews background-blind - correctly guessed that he must have deep academic expertise in the area.
Architecture
Good
Not his deepest area of expertise but still strong, with no issue on the basics and reasonable answers for scaling. Notably brought up privacy and security concerns, which is something that often gets ignored.
Technical communication
Good
And probably aided by exceptional depth.
