I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Fortinet
No offer
Positive experience
Difficult interview
Application
I applied in-person. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Fortinet (Burnaby, BC) in Feb 2017
Interview
Did a 1.5 hour remote technical assessment. Was interviewed at the office the week after submitting the assessment. Interview was with a panel of four testing my technical skills for the position, asking questions about the projects on my resume, and asking question about the answers I submitted for the remote assessment. After that I had to do a short written assessment that took 20 minutes.
First round with the team member, all networking questions with some firewall and security related questions. Job description said software dev engineer in test but actual job was for support on call. No reply after the first interview.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Fortinet (Ottawa, ON) in Mar 2021
Interview
The first step is an online assessment, all about network engineering protocols and devices operation. I also did a personality quiz.
The second step is a technical interview which was scheduled for an hour.
Then they ghosted you, no reason and feedback provided. I mailed them one month later asking for a feedback, they told me the decision hasn't been made. And two months later I sent a mail to express that I was still interested in this position and asked them about the result of the interview again, then I received a refusal letter. Totally wasting my time.
I really hope they can learn to respect everyone.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
network engineering protocols and devices operation
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Fortinet (Burnaby, BC) in Feb 2019
Interview
I received a phone call from a recruiter saying they were interested in hiring me for the Software Dev QA Engineer position. Over the process, the recruiters were very supportive and tried their best to prepare me for the exam and interview.
A week later I took an online exam which consisted of aptitude questions, Linux command questions, a routing question, and 2 database questions. I had 1 hour to do the exam and I barely finished on time.
The following week I was scheduled for an interview with the team lead and 3 other team members. When asked about what to expect from the interview, I was told it would be a conversational interview where we would discuss my skills and experience, some of the projects I worked on, my knowledge about the company and it's products, and talk a little bit about my technical skills such as scripting and basic routing protocols.
The interviewers did not seem very interested in hearing about my experiences and the types of projects I've worked on, as they were more focused on my technical knowledge. I even showed them my portfolio and tried to explain my roles and tasks but they told me not to go in to too much detail and just give a brief summary. In all honesty, I think the team was looking for someone who could speak their language so that they could easily communicate as they were discussing things in their language during the interview and had difficulty trying to explain the questions to me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q1. What is the difference between a router, switch, and bridge?
Q2. How would you count the lines in a file that contain the following pattern: 1) the pattern must be in { }, within the { } there can only be alphabets and spaces, 3) there should be at least 1 character within the { }. (This question was later simplified to finding a pattern such as "abc")
Q3. There is an internal network behind a firewall using NAT. A host from the internal network sends out a request using UDP to an external server and waits for 10 seconds. The external server takes 7 seconds to send a response which never reaches the internal host. Why doesn't the response reach the internal host?
Q4 There is an internal network with 2 hosts behind a firewall using NAT. An internal host 1 sends out UDP requests to an external server. How does the server know to respond to host 1 and not host 2 if the internal IP addresses are not shown due to NAT?
Q5. There is a clock. The hour hand takes 24 hours to do 1 full circle while the minute hand takes 60 minutes to do 1 full circle. The time is 10:20. What is the angle between the 2 hands precisely.
Q6. If Wireshark was not installed on a host, what other tools would you use for packet capturing?
