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The Interview Loop, Stage by Stage1 / 2

2 min lesson

The practical / work-trial round

Think through this situation: "You have four hours for a practical build and realize you can't finish everything you scoped. What do you do?" Give the practical answer in plain words.

Step 1 of 2

This is the block that decides it. Cursor's signature is a paid, real-project onsite - for SWE it's an ~8-hour build, sometimes one to two days. The IT equivalent is most likely a hands-on build, automation or live troubleshoot, not a quiz (general-industry inference, confirm with your recruiter).

The format mirrors day-one work on purpose: a real problem, limited docs and a few hours to show how you operate under ambiguity. They're not grading a perfect answer. They're watching your working style.

  1. 1Scope fast. Spend the first ten minutes pinning down what "done" means and the smallest version that's genuinely useful. Say your scope out loud and check it.
  2. 2Build something that runs. Get a working slice end-to-end early, then deepen - a script that provisions one app beats a beautiful design that does nothing.
  3. 3Narrate trade-offs. As you go, say what you're choosing and what you're deferring, so they see the judgment behind the code.
  4. 4Leave it documented. A short README or runbook with assumptions, how to run it and what you'd do next signals you build for the team, not just for the demo.
Shipping is the value

Bias hard toward a working, demoable result over a perfect-but-unfinished one. A provisioning script that handles the common case and degrades gracefully, demoed live, beats an elegant architecture diagram with no running code. In a ship-fast culture, finishing is the signal.

This is where the AI-authenticity read happens

Use Cursor and AI tooling visibly and well. Don't paste a vague prompt and accept whatever comes back - drive the tool: scope the change, review the diff, catch the hallucinated API call, iterate. The interviewers build an AI code editor, so they can tell within minutes whether you actually work this way or are performing it for the room.