Overall the interview was pretty laid back. It was mostly focused on conversation and getting to know each of the people there and finding any similar interests that were job related or not. Toward the end was a relatively simple logic based coding question to see how you think of a problem ahead of you.
I applied online. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Tome (Michigan) (Royal Oak, MI) in Mar 2016
Interview
I recently flunked the interviewing process at Tome and thought I would pass along my impressions to help future candidates down the road.
Tome was started by a couple of entrepreneurs who had successfully sold their previous Detroit area start-up, Livio Radio, over to Ford Motor Company for a relatively modest $10M sum. Their new venture is currently split into three different focuses: smart desks, electric bikes, and lastly, top secret, "experimental" projects.
The way the interview sequence works is that after you connect up with their HR person (who in my case was actually Tome's President), they'll schedule a phone screen for you. If you can pass that, you'll be invited back for one or possibly two on-site interviews. Both my interview sessions had coding & algorithm questions (I’ve recapped a couple of them below).
Their office is in the middle of downtown Royal Oak, which should be a shorter, relatively convenient commute for anyone centrally located in the Detroit area. It's also steps away from the city's SMART bus station, in case you're interested in using Detroit's regional public transit to get to the office. There are lots of lunch and dinner options available in downtown Royal Oak, and from the size of the office, it looks like Tome can easily accommodate up to about 25 employees in total in that space (which they're hoping to expand up to, from today's current 11-12 team members).
While some startups value experience and maturity, Tome appears to skew young (the mid-30’s president appears to be the senior guy in the company). While everyone was mostly friendly and welcoming; if I had to guess why I flunked the interview process, the explicit thumbs down against me likely came from the director of engineering (who did a poor job hiding low enthusiasm and high skepticism while talking to me as a prospective mobile developer; whereas the developers Tome is very eager to land today, as of early 2016, are embedded engineers who know things like low level Bluetooth).
Hopefully my experience flunking the Tome interview process will help you to prepare to pass your interviewing day. If you find any of the information in this review helpful, please let me know by voting "Yes" on the "Helpful?" question below (this helps to motivate me to be as detailed as possible).
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
given an array of numbers, come up with a new array where each entry in that array the product of all the numbers in the source array *except* the number in the same position in the source array.
i.e.
1, 2, 3, 4 produces 24, 12, 8, 6
2, 3, 2, 3 produces 18, 12, 18, 12
