I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Fitbit (San Diego, CA) in Nov 2015
Interview
I applied online through their website. Then no word from them for months. I got an email from their recruiter who basically just went over my resume. I'm an EE with no formal coding training so I'm suprised they even got back to me.
Anyway, the recruiter seemed to like me so he set me up with one of their hiring managers for an interactive coding challenge involving linked lists. Luckily, I got a heads up from a review on glassdoor about them asking linked list questions so I studied up on them the few days prior. I got through most of it but got nervous and fumbled at the end. He told me to work on it for a little while after we got off the phone and email it back to him. Well, I did. Then I didn't hear anything back for a while until I got another email from their recruiter with the next coding challenge.
See my below comments about the coding challenge.
My suggestion to Fitbit is be more specific about what you're looking for in a candidate and ask questions which are relevant to that specific job. Firmware engineering is a huge field.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Refactor a linked list containing random numbers into two linked lists - one even and one odd.
Read in a binary file containing an unknown number of packed 12bit values. Then output a file containing the last 32 values read and the 32 largest values.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Fitbit (Boston, MA) in May 2016
Interview
I applied online through the company website. I was contacted the next day by the recruiter, who talked to me about my experience. He was not very friendly. He set me up with a phone interview with a principal engineer. Did some live coding and Q&A with the engineer. That must have went well, because I was then sent a coding challenge. The coding challenge involves reading 12 bit data from a file and some data structures for storing the data that was read. I performed the coding challenge in the same night and returned it to him. I can only conclude my answer was satisfactory as I was then invited on site.
The coordination / communication with the recruiter was poor- I had to state numerous times I was not local and needed travel booked but could stay with friends / family while I was in town. I could tell she was not listening because she booked me a hotel anyways (which I had them cancel because I felt it was wasteful). On top of it all, they booked me on Spirit (worst airline in existence).
The on site interview was unpleasant. I interviewed for 5 hours straight through lunch time (roughly 11-4) but was not provided with a break or food. I'm not sure who came up with that idea, but its customary / common sense to treat potential employees a little better.
I met with a bunch of different people, some were pushy, some were nice, some people who were interviewing me seemed to be new grads (wtf?). It was odd to be fielding behavior questions from fresh outs when I was interviewing for a senior position. Got a lot of cocky vibes from the engineers there, I was not clicking with them but nonetheless was answering their questions correctly. With the types of egos in the interview, you'd think I was interviewing at Apple or Google. I knew I wasn't going to be offered as I could tell the chemistry was a bit off. A few days letter came the rejection email, and they didn't even use the right name in the email (an obvious copy / paste error). I thought this was wildly unprofessional. I probed for some extra feedback, but was provided with the standard nonsense. All in all a negative experience for sure.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Fitbit
Interview
I had a HR phone interview. The person asked me more technical questions than basic HR questions. He was asking a lot about Operating systems and my project experience. The overall experience was not so pleasant because the person who interviewed was a little rude.
