Fairly standard. Interviewer didn't go over resume or ask about background. Jumped straight into technical questions on a google doc. Interviewer wasn't very collaborative and I could tell he was working on other work during the interview as I tried to figure out the solution. No feedback after interview.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at IPSY (San Mateo, CA) in Oct 2018
Interview
Currently had two round technical phone interviews. There may be an onsite interview in the future. If you live far away from San Mateo, then maybe a google hangout interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of words, return a list of the shortest unique prefix of each word in the list.
For example,
given [apple, toy, angel, angular, tofu]
result [ap, toy, ange, angu, tof]
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at IPSY (San Mateo, CA) in Jun 2018
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me. The first round was a phone screen to solve an algorithm question with google doc.
Then I went onsite. It was 4 back to back algorithm solving on a whiteboard. No time was given for lunch. By the time I got to the 4th round, I was on a hungry stomach, it was 2 pm, and have been whiteboarding for 3 hours.
I asked them why they chose a certain technology rather than another, none of them can give a clear answer other than everyone else uses it.
One of the interviewers could not tell the difference between Java’s characteristic and what’s available in other languages. He seemed appalled that things like queues and stacks are just arrays in other languages.
Another interviewer asked a whiteboard algorithm question that he didn't even have a deep understanding of. Only remembers one way of solving the problem.
As a company with products that caters mostly to women (cosmetics subscription) surprisingly only the most junior dev is a woman and seems to not involved in any decision making in the product.
I understand that interviewing takes away from everyone's work, but it seems like the senior engineer and managers have given zero thought into this.