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      Collage.com

      Acquired by Foreground

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      Lead Software Engineer Interview

      Jul 12, 2019
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Detroit, MI
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Collage.com (Detroit, MI) in Jul 2019

      Interview

      The interview process is onerous and disrespectful of a candidate's time. In total, I spent over 12 hours studying for and taking their tests. They did not even have the decency to tell me I was rejected until I followed up days later. Based on their own estimated times, their tests should take about 5 hours (not including studying), but they will take longer if you're not intimately familiar with ECMA6 and graphic algorithms. It is very clear that the company does not understand that a good software engineer will be able to learn any language/function/algorithm. Instead, they are clearly looking for engineers who already have the exact experiences and knowledge as their existing team. This is a great way to build a stagnant engineering team. I should have been suspicious when I saw "10x developer" in their job advert. That is a huge red flag of a toxic engineering department. Emailing with one of the engineers made this readily apparent when I asked for clarification on a scenario not covered in the instructions and he replied by copying and pasting the instructions. This is an engineering department run by "10x developers" who have no communication skills and seem intent on keeping out any engineers who have different backgrounds. My background is in PHP, which the company does use, but none of the interview questions were in PHP. Despite being told the exam would be code agnostic, it was entirely in JavaScript. I have twenty years experience working as a developer and eight years working for a very well-known company admired for its positive culture. By the end of this interview, I honestly didn't even want the job anymore.

      Interview questions [3]

      Question 1

      The first part of the interview is a video code-pairing session. You need to know ECMA6 and promises very well. That's all the test is about. You get thirty minutes to solve three problems related to asynchronous requests and timeouts. There were so many issues with this test, though. First, these are terrible conditions to code under. Second, their own poorly written code was throwing so many JavaScript errors that the console was useless. Third, they included a function that was never used to solve the problems but consistently threw me off as I tried to figure out how to use it. Fourth, at the end of the session, the engineer admitted he didn't understand why the first problem was solved by solving the second and third problems, but that's just how it worked.
      1 Answer

      Question 2

      The second part of the interview process is a take home exam with two questions. The first question asks you to create a scaling algorithm for an image on a canvas. It's not hard, but it could take some time if you've never worked on that kind of algorithm before. The question is made more difficult by only providing the image aspect ratio and not the image dimensions.
      1 Answer

      Question 3

      The second question on the take home exam is completely disrespectful of a candidate's time. In four hours, they expect you to add three significant functions to a JavaScript/HTML 5 drawing program, fix existing bugs (you have to find them), and then refactor their code. The solution requires writing several more algorithms. It's a project that no one would ever have to complete in four hours. After the test, an engineer followed-up asking me to benchmark my algorithms and explain how I would improve performance. The algorithms performed within fractions of milliseconds at high load. Why would any engineer waste their time trying to shave fractions of milliseconds off their code?
      1 Answer
      7
      avatar
      Collage.com response
      6y
      Thank you for your response. I apologize that you had a negative experience. We know that the take home exercise is rigorous - it is designed this way because we want to ensure the individuals that we hire have the skills to be successful. We have hired some great talent using the take home exercise who have enjoyed completing it, however, we also realize that it can be time consuming and frustrating for others, especially those that we do not end up hiring, and i completely understand that. With that said, the activity does state a time estimate of 3-4 hours on it. We would not ask nor expect for anyone to take longer than that and would have completely understood if you had chosen to not proceed with the exercise beyond the indicated timeline. Based on your experience, we will think more about how we might be able to make the time expectation clear so that nobody ends up spending 12 hours on it in the future which i agree is unreasonable and definitely not the intention of the exercise. - Head of Talent Acquisition

      Other Lead Software Engineer interview reviews for Collage.com

      Lead Software Engineer Interview

      Aug 3, 2020
      Anonymous employee
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Collage.com in Feb 2020

      Interview

      I liked the process of many short interviews and coding challenges spread out over the course of several weeks. The number of interviews was a bit grueling, although none of the individual steps seemed harder than expected. The recruiter got back to me quickly and regularly.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Describe a time you had to compare trade-offs to make a technical decision on a software project.
      Answer question
      1