Actually, I don’t usually write about my interview experience here but I felt that I should clarify everything for future applicants. Before going into detail, I need to say a couple of things about the company and their job postings Sorry folks, it can be a little long, hold tight!
First off, the company posts the same roles every 2 – 3 months (to be fair, 2 months). Even from this point, you can see their struggle with recruitment as a small startup and also make assumptions on their weak and unrealistic hiring process.
I applied for the Front-End Developer position. When you see this job posting, you immediately think “This position is for me, they don’t expect too much” because the whole job description was like that “You are highly interested in learning about or already have experience in A, B, C, D”. That’s all. You remember the silly one sentence recruiter’s posts on LinkedIn. “I am looking for a developer, please email me”. Everybody remembered that right?
Anyway, you said “Hope is the poor man’s bread” then applied. Congratulations! There are 4 interviews. The first step was the initial phone screen. I was extremely honest about my work experience and skills and the recruiter told me we really appreciate honesty and transparency (!) here. Awesome. Then she immediately arranged the technical interview but didn’t reply to my question about the scope of the interview but I was already worried about what I saw on Glassdoor. (irrelevant questions based on their postings)
The second interview was technical. The interview started 15 minutes late because they sent me the wrong link. Then HR figured it out and sent me the right link. I was still expecting domain-based (JavaScript, React, etc.) questions as a blind hope. Nope. She asked me somewhat easy or let me say medium Leetcode questions (Live coding). She was nice but not too helpful to correct my simple console.log and syntax mistakes. She waited a lot to help, and I lost a couple of minutes for each question. Also, she didn’t tell me how many questions she was going to ask but I guess there were 4 questions (maybe 3, who knows) in 45 minutes.
The third question was the exact same question that was shared here almost 3 years ago. I already knew the answer because when I saw this question here, I searched the answer and wrote down. (Yes, I didn’t even bother myself to try to solve the question, am I guilty?). I thought 30 seconds then said, “I cannot think about the logic”. I just didn’t want to try because you know it wouldn’t be fair. She just said “I have to end the interview”. Interesting. I believe honesty will win one day but apparently not today, then they will have real transparency in their job postings and work environment.
I can definitely say that they are not aware of their capacity and want to play the smart guy. Moreover, they didn’t try to change their hiring process, even questions in the last 3 years. Enough about my experience. Now, a couple of words about the questions. In general, they like string manipulation and array questions and when they want to seem like the smartest guy in the room, they ask a relatively difficult Binary Tree question as a golden shot.
