Interviewing at Cockroach Labs comes with a twist. The interviewing process is unconventional by design—especially for non-engineering positions. The interviews are exercise-based, focused on practical, day-in-the-life style work tasks. Additionally, resumes are removed from the process to fight unconscious bias. The process is crafted thoughtfully and customized for each role being hired for, but it can be a bit daunting for candidates who are used to traditional interviews. As someone who recently experienced the process first-hand, I thought it would be beneficial for potential candidates to hear about my interviewing experience and gain insight into the process. For a little context, I joined Cockroach Labs in July as the new Technical Writer. In this post, I’ll be looking at the interviews from the perspective of a tech writer, but the process applies to all open roles across the company. The typical technical writer hiring process goes something like this: You apply for an online job posting with your resume and work samples. The HR representative conducts a phone interview. If selected, you are called for an in-person interview. The in-person interview generally entails a writing (read: grammar) exercise, followed by routine questions. The interview is usually conducted by two or three tech writers and the hiring manager. In my experience, the typical interview process relies on the candidate telling the hiring team what they can do, rather than showing what they can do. This does not necessarily translate into the candidate being a good fit for the position and the team. By contrast, the interview process at Cockroach Labs is cross-functional and exercise-based, which is unconventional, yet effective in the sense it not only helps the company decide if the candidate is a good match for the position, but also helps the candidate evaluate if the company is a good fit for them.

Amruta Ranade

July 11, 2019

Internet of Things (IoT) and microservices-style applications need a database that can handle requirements such as fluctuating number of client connections, unpredictable workloads, and bursty throughputs. Traditional single-node databases handle these requirements by reducing latency to improve throughput. However, for modern distributed databases such as CockroachDB, the optimal approach to handle these requirements is to use multi-row SQL Data Manipulation Language (DML) and parallel processing. Multi-row DMLs provide an order-of-magnitude improvement in throughput performance as compared with equivalent single-row DMLs, which is why databases such as Oracle, MySQL, and Postgres widely support multi-row DMLs. CockroachDB has supported multi-row DMLs since the 1.0. This blog post discusses how to use multi-row DMLs, the performance benefits of multi-row DMLs over single-row DMLs, and the effects of compounding database and application parallelism in single-node vs. distributed databases.

Amruta Ranade

December 7, 2017