I applied through other source. I interviewed at Help.com in Jul 2019
Interview
An external recruiter contacted me and sent my resume to Help.com. We scheduled the "screen interview". The call lasted for around 20-35 minutes. First we talked about my background, the interviewer told me about the company, the usual. Later the interviewer started asking very specifics on what they do (would not help a candidate to show his/her skills really, with this kind of questions). Also, about my experience with profiling database queries, performance and API design. This last question was the most useless question, in the entire interview, not because of the type of question, API design for a backend developer position is really valid but the interviewer made it sound there is only one way to do API design and only their way, he didn't like when I said I don't understand what he was asking and I did not want to answer because I felt his attitude was all about we do the best API design, tell me what I want to hear and it has to be my way, so I refused to answer, playing dumb. Knowing what my CV and my track record shows though is that I have built systems in the same area and I have done it other way which I think it's more scalable compared to what they are doing. I am glad they did not want to continue. Their only feedback was that I did not answer the API design question correctly given my experience, I mean just wow, but I leave it there, keep building a system with the wrong technology and re-inventing the wheel.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you design a chat enterprise messaging system?
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Help.com (Austin, TX) in Jul 2017
Interview
A couple of lengthy phone screening calls led to an invitation to complete their online code 'challenge' and post it to github for them to review.
It seemed intentionally vague. Attempt to log on to a raw socket on their server, stream in and parse ambiguous data from it. Handle everything it could throw at you as per random disconnections and bad formats. In the midst of this, be able to submit some queries and show the correct results. Pretty unusual, but I came up with what seemed like a good working application that met the fuzzy requirements as best I could tell.
Rejected for amazingly trivial reasons. Something weird going on over there.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Help.com (Austin, TX) in Jun 2015
Interview
Two phone screens, 2.5 hours on-site interviewing with key staff, then required to deliver 100-day marketing plan. I had to reach out a week after the interview process ended to learn that they had already selected someone else. This made me wonder when they were going to tell me if I didn't ask, and felt disrespectful for the amount of time and research I put into the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you increase the percentage of marketing-qualified leads that convert into sales?
I'm sorry to hear you had this experience. Unfortunately, it falls in line with many things from the old management team/company. We recently shut down the old Help.com and have started fresh with a new team.
Our product is still in development but on track for an MVP release this summer. Would love to connect and learn more about you sometime around Q3.
Again, I apologize for the negative experience you had with previous team/company. That is definitely not how we operate today.