Start the Clock
Before you read on, decide what you would actually do in the next sixty seconds. Not what you should do — what you would do.
- Do you open the file, or the chat panel?
- Do you ask a question, or start working?
- If you are reaching for the AI, what exactly are you going to type?
Hold on to your answer. At the end of Chapter 2 you will score it.
The Brief
This course is built backwards from how most interview prep works. There is no chapter of principles up front. Instead you are going to sit through one interview — a single forty-minute session, minute by minute, including the parts that go wrong — and only afterwards work out what it was scored on.
That order is deliberate. Nobody fails this round because they had not read a list of best practices. They fail because at minute two, with a clock running and someone watching, they did the thing they always do. Watching a session end to end is the closest you can get to that pressure on paper.
So: you are twelve minutes into a call. The small talk is over. The interviewer shares a repository and says this.
"This has a token-bucket rate limiter. We're seeing requests get through that shouldn't. Find it and fix it. Then I'd like per-user limits. If there's time at the end we'll talk about what happens under concurrent traffic."
Then, almost as an afterthought:
"Use whatever tools you'd normally use — the AI's there if you want it."