So it all started with someone reaching out to me on hired.com to schedule a screening call. The guy didn’t call at the agreed upon time and gave some lame excuse requesting to do it another time. I agreed, but it already set things off on a bad note for me.
1.Screening Call: your normal tech screening call, trying to sell you the company, see if your comp expectations are realistic and see if you roughly have the right skills
2. Take home test (3 hours timed): TBH this one one of the more enjoyable take home tests I’ve done. They have an api endpoint they want you to hit and pull back some data; perform some calculations on it and send it back through a post call. Only gripe I have is their post endpoint, when your sending the data back could give you a more descriptive error message. I burned a lot of time thinking this thing was telling me that I wasn’t sending it JSON when i knew I was
Tip for stage 2, get your environment set up before you even start to the point where you have a piece of code ready to execute a get call so you can just switch out the URL when its go time.
3. Virtual on site:
2 System design portions, one coding, one manager interview.
One was on designing tiny URL so the tiny URL one is basically exactly how it sounds. This might be the only guy who gave me a pass mark.
The other one was designing a weather widget. The weather one is what I think was the primary nail in my coffin. So firstly this guy was in the office at a company that allows people to work from home; something ain’t right about a man like that. Secondly, this guy kept changing requirements on me so I had to adapt my design and what was particularly annoying was in the feedback afterwards it was noted my design didn’t match my original design..... really?. Also this guy seems to have dinged me on a bunch of small things. Like at the time I couldn’t remember that you could do a head rest call. He marked me down for that, but c’mon man that’s like a 3 second lesson to tell a developer you can do a head call.
The coding interview was trolling through a string to find the sub string that occurs the most. So I actually did this one super quick, I finished in like 15 mins. I don’t know if other devs do it that fast or not. He asked various questions afterwards I assume to attempt to fill the time. IE stuff about efficiency and the big O. Later in my feedback it was said he tried to guide me towards some performance improvements; maybe I’m just thick but I don’t recall any guiding, or him saying I needed to improve performance of my code.
Final manager interview. Asked general questions about my experience and things I worked on. Even this guy dinged me on something. But perhaps what he dinged me on I didn’t explain well enough.
Anyway, standard 1.5 weeks for rejection with your typical fluff rejection that they loved speaking with me and would look for more roles for me or some nonsense like that. Personally I find that sort of fluff insulting.
Most the things I was rejected on I feel were small things. In this industry seems like you have to score 100/100 on these interviews to get an offer. This company seems to be no exception.
