Prep for an elixir job interview

Questions / Help
1

Hi everyone,

I have started applying for web dev positions some of which are for elixir. As I was looking at some sample questions I realized that most are geared towards non-functional / OOP languages. Are there any common interview questions that are elixir specific or just generally asked at technical interviews for functional programming jobs?

Thanks

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2

One question I like to ask is to “explain how Elixir/Erlang handles concurrency?”
I am looking for an understanding of the presence of schedulers (how that number is determined) and the difference in handling long-running vs short-running processes. More open-ended, I would grade on the amount of accurate detail you could go into.

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3

Thanks, this is super helpful.

4

I’ve had several interviews where I got asked to write a small tool that processes huge inputs and calculates something. The interviewers were specifically looking at if I am using Elixir’s parallelisation APIs like Task.async_stream for the job.

It makes sense: Erlang and Elixir’s main selling points are the cheap, transparent and robust concurrency / parallelism. Not using that, one might as well go work with Python, Go or Rust, or just about any language without a solid parallelism story (which is like 99.9% of them).

So be prepared to demonstrate usage of GenServer, Agent and Task, but also show understanding of those OTP concepts in an oral conversation.

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