Technical Interview for a Company that uses Proprietary Software

[u/[deleted]]

[u/grantrules]

HR mentioned a lot of their software is “proprietary” and will take anybody time to get used to

99% of corporate software is proprietary.. it seems weird to even mention. Very few people are working on public software.

[u/wooweeitszea]

Have you asked the recruiter this question? You should always ask the recruiter the format of the technical interview and what to expect that way you can prepare. It could be a panel asking CS concepts, or pairing on a greenfield project in the language of your choice, or they have prepped something for you to debug, or some version of a ds&a style question. No way you or any strangers here would know without you asking first.

[u/mxldevs]

Proprietary just means you likely wouldn't have seen it outside of their company.

Something they slapped together in-house instead of buying from a vendor that you see at tech conferences and customizing it to their workflow.

So you should be comfortable with jumping into an unknown project's source code, understand it, and be able to work with it.

[u/Inevitable_Dust5684]

Proprietary software means they test your ability to learn unknown systems fast. Practice reading messy C# codebases on GitHub and ask the recruiter if the interview involves debugging existing code or building something new.

[u/db_tech_dev]

for proprietary software interviews they're almost never testing if you know their internal tool, they're testing if you can reason out loud when things aren't documented, so practice narrating your thought process on unfamiliar codebases instead of memorizing anything specific. since c# is your strongest and sql's in the stack, brush up on basic query writing and joins by hand since that's a common whiteboard-adjacent ask regardless of what proprietary layer sits on top. honestly the vba mention is the weirder signal here, worth asking in the interview itself what it's actually used for so you're not blindsided.

[u/coffeefuelledtechie]

Depends what they mean by that.

I worked for a company for 6 months that had all of that you mention and the company wrote really custom proprietary software stack that was ancient and archaic and even as an experienced software engineer, I have it 2 months and decided it wasn’t for me.

Backend C# was generated from XML using .NET framework 4, Ext.JS generated from XML but hand rolled custom libraries and no documentation… nah. I handed my notice in just before 6 months and left.

[u/Familiar-Range9014]

I would beush up on .NET concepts, application architecture, devops and microservices

[u/gm310509]

Pretty much all software developed by companies is proprietary.

It basically means they built it, they own it and it is for their exclusive use (which may involve licensing it for others to use): https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proprietary

[u/Mediocre-Pumpkin6522]

Research the company and find out what they do. Many companies have websites selling their product that will give you hints of what they're looking for. I had one interviewee who assumed CAD was 'computer aided design'. 5 minutes of browsing would have found in our case it was 'computer aided didspatch' for emergeny responders.

[u/ripndipp]

Probably proctoring software, they probably don't even have it tbh, maybe they are trying to spook you, your skills should speak for themselves