Disappointing Interview Experience – Unprofessional Behavior and Irrelevant Questions I recently had an interview for a BSP/Device Driver Development role, and I was deeply disappointed by both the unprofessional attitude of the interviewer and the irrelevant nature of the technical questions asked.
1. Unnecessary and Rude Behavior
From the very start, the interviewer’s tone was dismissive and rude, which made the entire experience uncomfortable. Instead of focusing on my qualifications, the interviewer seemed to go out of their way to cast doubt on my expertise. There was an underlying assumption that I must be inexperienced or lacking in knowledge. They questioned my answers in a way that felt more like an interrogation than a professional interview, which was frustrating and demoralizing.
2. Inappropriate Questions
The most glaring issue was the type of technical questions being asked. The interviewer insisted on asking me about recursion and string reversal, which are typically not relevant to BSP development or device driver work. These topics may be useful in certain contexts, but they have very little bearing on low-level system programming. In fact, recursion is actively avoided in many low-level systems, such as boot loaders and device drivers, due to concerns about stack size limitations and performance overhead.
For example:
Recursion is often not used in boot loader or device driver development, especially because stack space is minimal and efficiency is crucial. Recursion introduces stack overhead that can quickly lead to problems, and the iterative approach is typically preferred.
String reversal, similarly, has little to do with hardware-level programming, where the focus is on memory management, I/O handling, interrupt handling, and other low-level operations.
Asking these questions not only seemed irrelevant to the job role but also discredited the seriousness of the technical interview. It was clear that the interviewer had a limited understanding of what is actually involved in BSP and driver development.
3. Lack of Relevance to the Role
In a BSP/Device Driver Development role, one would expect questions about:
Hardware interfacing, such as register-level programming and device initialization.
Interrupt handling, memory management, DMA, or dealing with specific hardware quirks.
Low-level debugging techniques, such as using JTAG, kernel logs, or serial communication for debugging drivers.
Instead, I found myself being grilled on algorithmic problems that are far more relevant to data structures and algorithms than to embedded systems programming. This felt like a misalignment between the role I was applying for and the technical assessment being conducted.
4. Conclusion
Unfortunately, my experience with this interview was not only frustrating but also unprofessional. An interviewer who dismisses candidates and focuses on irrelevant topics instead of evaluating real-world expertise in embedded development doesn’t reflect well on the company’s understanding of what makes someone qualified for the role.
If you’re applying for a BSP or device driver development role, I would suggest being prepared for some basic hardware and systems-level questions. However, I would strongly caution against expecting this kind of disrespectful behavior or a disconnected interview process.
I hope the company takes the time to review their interview process and reassess the focus of their technical interviews to better align with the skills required for the actual job.