I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Smartcar
Interview
The interview process was very lengthy and had 5 steps:
- Recruiter Call
- Technical Screening w/ Manager
- Take-home Project
- Take-home Project Review
- 5 round Interview Loop
Overall, I really enjoyed everyone I worked with during the interview process! My recruiter was very helpful and every engineer I interviewed with was personable and talented. Definitely people I would've enjoyed having as co-workers.
Smartcar is great about communicating what each step of the process is and what the expectations are. They're also very prompt about getting back to you with feedback + results of each round. I also enjoyed that each technical round was practical and related to the job you'd be doing.
Despite these upsides, I think their interview process is way too long. The take-home project is non-trivial and there's 9 distinct interview rounds (including each step of the interview loop). That's a large time investment, especially if you're already working a full-time job + have a family.
Even most tech giants don't have such a long recruitment process, and their compensation/benefits are significantly higher.
Ultimately, I had a positive experience and Smartcar seems like a great place to work! However, their interview process needs to be streamlined.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Smartcar (Mountain View, CA) in Sep 2024
Interview
I made initial contact with the recruiter to express my interest in the role and submitted my resume for review. After careful consideration, they decided not to proceed with my application.
The interview process involved a call with the recruiter, who was friendly and helpful. The next step was a 1 hr call with the hiring manager, followed by a take home project. If you pass that, you go on and do a project review, then a final interview with a couple of folks lasting probably 3 hours.
One thing to note. On the take home project I wrote over 1500 lines of code with 2 pages worth of documentation in 3 days and got rejected. Their standards are unrealistic - they expected it to be production ready with no mistakes, full test coverage (both unit and integration), error handling, and with full documentation. I had all of these and they were nitpicky. Most of us have lives, and I would NEVER ask 1 engineer without a code review to write that much code in 3 days and expect it to be nothing more than a prototype, let alone production-ready. They didn't even have the decency to listen to my reasoning as to why I made certain decisions during development, and what I decided to focus my limited time on.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Typical stuff, like your experiences, projects etc.
