Spoke with a product manager at the company after submitting my resume. Before the conversation, I got a pretty good vibe regarding his opinion of my experiences, skills, and how I could potentially fit in, however during the actual phone conversation I felt as though I was condescended towards for no apparent reason, and it was clear there was absolutely no preparation done on their part.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Basic questions centering around product strategy, development, operations.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at ORA (Chicago, IL)
Interview
The process started out with a phone screen, and then I was brought in for an onsite interview. I received an agenda from HR before the process and I was happy I knew what the process was going to involve where they assured me it was a non-pressure interview. The interview consisted of a one hour coding challenge, 1/2 hour where I reviewed some code in a language I did know claim to know, 1/2 hour where I fixed some bugs in some backend JavaScript, a discussion about my design skills and a discussion with the CTO. For the coding challenge, I was given a document with many different requirements that weren’t really possible to finish in an hour. Unfortunately, “look over the shoulder” coding challenges seem to be common place these days and are a pressure tactic whether this is intentional or not. It was also a .NET developer position, and the interview took place on a Mac with a Magic Mouse using Visual Code. Unfamiliar machine, mouse and editor. The JavaScript debugging was also do with a developer looking over my shoulder on the same Mac with no debugger. I realized after the interview that JavaScript can be debugged using Visual Studio Code but the interview neglected to tell me that. The interview also ran from 11:00 - 3:00 without a lunch break. Overall, whether this was the intent or not, this was a pressure interview, and even if I would have been given an offer, I would have had to think long and hard about accepting a position at a company that conducts this type of interview. I know a lot of people lie about their experience and these tests really are to make sure that you can do what you say you can do. Unfortunately, do the conditions that this interview was conducted done under, I believe their assessment of me was incorrect.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked to to explain how I would convert a monolithic application into microservices.
I applied in-person. I interviewed at ORA (Chicago, IL) in Jun 2018
Interview
How they found me:
The CTO contacted me on LinkedIn and it seemed like a good fit given my background and their need for senior dev. I spoke with the lead javascript engineer and went through some basic framework knowledge questions. Things went well so they invited me in for an interview.
The interview:
I showed up a few minutes before 8 and no one from the company was there yet--an office manager from another company (shared space) let me in. Finally my interviewer showed up about 10 minutes late. It took some time to get the machine I would be taking my programming challenge on up and running but eventually that portion of the interview started. The challenge was to fix some broken unit tests and I got about 70% of the way through and time ran out. The guy administering this said I did very well and better than most candidates. Then I spoke with the CTO and everything seemed great.
Response:
Several weeks went by and I heard nothing from them so I reached out and promptly heard back that they were passing on me because there was no longer "capacity to hire more people".
Conclusion:
The CTO reached out to me, they knew my salary requirements before I came in and I did extremely well on all stages of the interview process only to be told they couldn't hire me..? It was a strange response and ultimately a huge waste of my time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked to fix some broken javascript unit tests to showcase some basic algo skills (recursion, filtering, etc.) and also basic javascript syntax.