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Someone from their team took my interview. It started with the usual “Tell me about yourself,” and then the interviewer said, “By the way, I forgot to introduce myself—I’m a Python developer with over 3 years of experience.” She didn’t seem to have much knowledge of Ruby on Rails. During the interview, she mentioned that having null values in the database is not optimal schema design, which I found a bit odd because in many cases, allowing null is valid and context-dependent. Then she questioned why we can’t add database table columns directly into the model, and I explained that in Ruby on Rails, we follow Convention over Configuration (CoC), and Active Record handles mapping between database attributes and models automatically. We don’t need to manually declare every attribute in the model file. She also asked why we use user as a key in the request body payload. Again, I explained that this is standard Rails practice—wrapping parameters inside a model name (like user) is a convention that aligns with strong parameters and Rails’ form-handling logic. Despite giving what I believe was a solid, well-structured solution in the 45-minute coding round, and doing my best throughout the 90 minutes, the interview felt more like a debate than a discussion. She kept questioning everything with a “why this, why that” mindset, often ignoring Rails conventions altogether. Eventually, I was rejected, which was quite disappointing. I had heard a lot of great things about this company, but the interview experience felt unfair—especially when evaluated by someone who didn’t fully understand the framework I specialize in. I believe if a company is genuinely looking for top-tier talent, they should ensure the interviewers are capable of evaluating candidates appropriately, especially when dealing with framework-specific expertise like Ruby on Rails.
avatar

Product Engineer

Interviewed at Shuru

4.9★
Apr 7, 2025

Someone from their team took my interview. It started with the usual “Tell me about yourself,” and then the interviewer said, “By the way, I forgot to introduce myself—I’m a Python developer with over 3 years of experience.” She didn’t seem to have much knowledge of Ruby on Rails. During the interview, she mentioned that having null values in the database is not optimal schema design, which I found a bit odd because in many cases, allowing null is valid and context-dependent. Then she questioned why we can’t add database table columns directly into the model, and I explained that in Ruby on Rails, we follow Convention over Configuration (CoC), and Active Record handles mapping between database attributes and models automatically. We don’t need to manually declare every attribute in the model file. She also asked why we use user as a key in the request body payload. Again, I explained that this is standard Rails practice—wrapping parameters inside a model name (like user) is a convention that aligns with strong parameters and Rails’ form-handling logic. Despite giving what I believe was a solid, well-structured solution in the 45-minute coding round, and doing my best throughout the 90 minutes, the interview felt more like a debate than a discussion. She kept questioning everything with a “why this, why that” mindset, often ignoring Rails conventions altogether. Eventually, I was rejected, which was quite disappointing. I had heard a lot of great things about this company, but the interview experience felt unfair—especially when evaluated by someone who didn’t fully understand the framework I specialize in. I believe if a company is genuinely looking for top-tier talent, they should ensure the interviewers are capable of evaluating candidates appropriately, especially when dealing with framework-specific expertise like Ruby on Rails.

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