Citrix Systems Software Development Engineer II Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – The position was for a WPF .NET and C# programmer. It was a super secret project and a new group at Citrx and they did not talk about the work itself at all. It was an extremely advanced technical interview with two people interviewing me. The 1st part was me summarizing my career, the 2nd and longest part of the interview was me answering extremely advanced .NET and WPF questions, the 3rd part was use a whiteboard to answer a programming question.

During my summary of my career I got to my current experience. In my mind my plan was to talk about my entire experience there and I started by using the phrase 'most of my experience was with back-end programming' and that was a huge mistake as one interviewer took me to task on it. I also tried to be a bit light hearted and mentioned my first experience at my current company was a 'fun project' in a sarcastic sense and the one interviewer took me to task on that as well. I tried to do some damage control and explain to him that the reason it was difficult for me is I was just starting to learn .NET and the task was rather advanced without too much available information and documentation on the subject matter.

They asked me a bunch of really hard WPF and C# questions and they literally came one after the other with no time to think. I got the famous boiler plate question 'what is the difference between and interface and an abstract class?' A lot of WPF questions and a lot of obscure questions regarding .NET. They also asked about how I would handle debugging situations. Unfortunately I drew a blank on that one, I was pretty nervous at this point. One very advanced and a bit of a strange question on WPF he asked and I answered it as best I could and I got it mostly right. I asked Ive never done that and never even consider ever doing that, have you tried that here? and he said 'Actually no we haven't'. I was not sure if he was being sarcastic or serious, but if he was serious I am not sure why one would ask a question that didn't pertain to the position. I actually felt I did OK on this part of the interview.

The last thing they asked me to do was write out a program problem on the whiteboard. I simply couldn't think at this point and I just wanted the interview to end because I really felt embarrassed by my lack of ability to answer it. I feel I am a pretty good programmer but they apparently wanted a rock star for this position and I wasn't it.