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The Interview Loop1 / 3

1 min lesson

The technical debugging screen

Answer this as if it were happening now: "You're handed a Cursor-style issue in the debugging screen. Before doing anything else, what's the highest-value first move and why?" Say what supports your choice.

Step 1 of 3

This is the round that proves you can actually do the job. You'll get a real-world Cursor-style issue to reproduce and reason about and you may be handed a log snippet or a small broken artifact. They grade your method and your narration as much as the final answer.

Companies like Stripe and Retool run debugging interviews the same way: existing broken code or logs and an interviewer watching how you move. The worst move is to guess blindly. The best is to clarify, then narrate every hypothesis as you isolate the cause.

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Full explanation

The method they're grading

The method they're grading

THE DEBUGGING METHOD

Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.

diagram: flow

They grade the method and your narration as much as the final answer.

Narrate the read, don't just stare at itshell
# User: "Cursor won't connect, everything times out."
# Pull the logs first, quote the real line.
$ tail -n 40 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor/logs/main.log
[error] request to https://api2.cursor.sh failed: ETIMEDOUT
[warn]  proxy detected: http://corp-proxy:8080

# Hypothesis: corporate proxy is blocking the API host, not a Cursor bug.
# Cheap test: curl the host through the same proxy.
$ HTTPS_PROXY=http://corp-proxy:8080 curl -I https://api2.cursor.sh
# 200 -> proxy is fine, look elsewhere. timeout -> proxy/allowlist is root cause.
Interview move

End with a two-part answer: what you'd tell the user right now and what you'd escalate. For the proxy case: "I'd ask the user to allowlist api2.cursor.sh through their corporate proxy and I'd file a bug for Eng to surface a clearer proxy error in the UI so the next user self-serves." That shows support and the impact mindset in one breath.

Don't confuse a fix with a root cause

Telling the user to restart the app might clear the symptom and still leave the defect live for everyone else. State plainly when you're applying a workaround versus when you've actually found the cause and what you'd do to confirm the difference.