The exact name of the job title was "Fullstack Software Developer, Junior", but this was not one of the availiable titles that glassdoor gave me to pick from, so I went with the other title that you see.
1. RECRUITING/PHONE SCREENING: I cold-contacted a military technical recruiter on linkedin and we had a phone call which at the time seemed casual to me, but that I now suspect was a phone screening. She seemed to be building some sort of internal candidate profile for me during the call and she said that she would be sending it out to hiring managers across all departments after our call. 2-3 days later she emailed me and said that a hiring manager had responded and they wanted to set up an interview for me the following week. I received an email with a Microsoft Teams Meeting link and the names of my interviewers.
2. INTERVIEW: When the time of the interview finally came around, only one of the identified interviewers was on the call. I am fairly confident my interview was not HR, or a trained interviewer, but a senior developer on the team that I would be joining. I had a suit and tie on, and he was had crazy and hair and was wearing a casual sweatshirt. My interviewer began by describing the program I would be working on and gave me a chance to ask questions about it since the work required a Secret Security Clearance and was not detailed at all in the job description. In a seemingly unorganized and unprepared manner, my interviewer proceeded to ask me questions about 2 of the 3 projects that I had described in my resume. In lieu of technical questions or a coding/algorithm problem, he had me share my screen and asked me a random question that he wanted me to show and tell how I would research and learn about. He said the purpose of this was to see how I research and learn new things. The question was "How many satelites are currently orbiting the earth?" It seemed pretty random and out of pocket to me, and in reality I would have simply googled the answer and called it a day, but since I felt he was looking for something more and that that would be way too easy, I googled it and then found some additional resources to support the google response, and I assessed the quality of those additional sources by investigating their "about" pages. After that, he let me ask my questions for him, and the interview was over. The interview was scheduled to last 45 minutes, but it only lasted 39 minutes. At the time of writing this, it has only been 4 hours since my interview. I am going to list the interview difficulty as "Very Easy" but I want to add that I am actually a little concerned that it was suspiciously too easy. I actually prepared a lot and studied a lot for this interview, and my interviewer asked very few questions, and the questions that he did ask were not really very good or well planned out ones. He seemed to just be looking at my resume and thinking of questions on the fly. I am actually a little upset that he did not ask me more and better questions because if he had, I feel like I would have been able to really impress him with all of my carefully prepared responses and examples of why I am a perfect fit for the role. Oh well. That aside, I feel that I had an answer for every single question and at no point did I fumble or go silent. I directly asked him at the end of the interview, "Was there anything about my background or experience that we discussed today that makes you think I am NOT a good fit for this role?" He responded, as far as memory serves, "No, I think you did great. You are pretty much in the same boat as other junior developers. I am still on the fence about the coding bootcamp vs college degree thing. I have worked with college degree engineers that are worse than bootcamp grads, and I have worked with bootcamp grads that are worse than college degree engineers." I used these interview reports myself when preparing, so I feel I too have to pay it forward and make my own interview report. Hopefully this is helpful for someone out there, and if it is, make sure you pay it forward too when your time comes!
