My Interviews After Bootcamp: Summaries
Tags: interview, career, beginners
Published: 2019-09-30 17:04:03

As a followup to my last piece, I want to give a short (anonymized) picture of what my interviews were like while searching for my first position in the field.  I sent in roughly 300 applications in 3 months.  What follows are the experiences I had with companies where I got at least a phone screen (15, or 0.5%).  

I hope this provides a window into some of the interview processes / questions you'll encounter, and makes you more comfortable with the idea of failure in the job search.  I never totally got the hang of it - I'd still let my ego get bruised with every rejection.  But it did get easier.

Every one of these - except the two companies I met at my school's career fair - was from an online application or interaction.  I heard from all over that the quickest way in was through connections at meetups & events.  Meetups kill my family time, so after a couple of unsuccessful startup-themed events, I retreated back to my internet comfort zone.  I don't necessarily endorse this, but it did eventually work for me.

Again, this happened over three months.  The first month was mostly empty, and I started to pick up steam around the end of the second month.  Most of these happened in the final five weeks of my job search.

The format is:

##Company industry/specialty
broad # of employees, application method
__Interview type__: information

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##Education space/video focus
50 employees, applied on LinkedIn
__HR Interview (Phone):__ Why ********; front or backend; do you know or want to know C#
__Outcome:__ did not advance.

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##Social/e-commerce
1000 employees, applied on LinkedIn
__HR Interview (phone)__ - why ********, career trajectory, what's something at work you're proud of
__Tech Interview 1 (video):__ Longest substring with `k` unique characters
__Tech interview 2 (video):__ Reverse letter order in a string; refactor that method to be recursive; reverse word order in a string; build a hash class from the ground up.
__Outcome:__ did not advance.

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##Autonomous driving
500 employees, applied on LinkedIn
__Tech Interview 1 (phone):__ React: state management, props, data pathways; Redux state management; CSS box model; CSS frameworks (BEM, Semantic, light vs heavyweight); stackable columns.
__Outcome:__ did not advance.

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##Internal chat
100 employees, applied on LinkedIn
__HR Interview (phone):__ why ********, career trajectory, have you ever contributed to process/best practices at work
__Tech interview 1 (Zoom):__ React: lifecycle methods, performance improvements, performant component design; role of Redux in app; containers vs. VMs; Javascript: is JS single-threaded; sync vs async; call stack vs. event stack; front or backend.
__Outcome:__ Did not advance.

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##B2B candidate services
50 employees, applied on LinkedIn
__Dev Interview (video):__ why ********, career trajectory, work style
__Tech interview 1 (video):__ JS trivia (`var` vs `let`), `innerHTML` === bad.
Q1 - Given a `.csv` of # of clicks and a domain, give a total of clicks for each level of the domain
I.e. input: `[‘90, sports.yahoo.com’, ‘10, news.yahoo.com’]`
Output: `{ com: 100, yahoo.com: 100, sports.yahoo.com: 90, news.yahoo.com: 10 }`
Q2 - Given two arrays of strings, return the longest matching streak. 
I.e. input: `[‘/home’, ‘/store’, ‘/blog’, ‘/contact’], 
[‘/store’, ‘/blog’, ‘/home’, ‘/contact’]`
Output: `[‘/store’, ‘/blog’]`
__Onsite:__ 6 interviews with 9 people.  Behavioral, system design, product design, programming.  Algorithm question: Common ancestor in two tree nodes.  Given an array of objects that represent a binary tree (each object in the format `{parent: child}`), construct the tree and find out if two given nodes share an ancestor.
__Outcome:__ Did not advance.
__Feedback:__ need more production experience.

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##SEM / UX agency
20 employees, matched at school Job Fair
__HR Interview (in-person):__ Front or backend; where do you see yourself going; app demo
__Tech interview 1 (phone):__ Given a Linux path and the `.` and `..` operators, return a final path. Input: `”/etc/usr/../temp/./../../”`, output: `”/”`
__Onsite:__ 3 interviews with frontend, backend, & lead developer.  First 2 mostly behavioral, with some design questions: how would you slice up this layout, how would you solve this design problem.  3rd: high-level design of a ‘subscription purchase’ feature on an e-commerce platform, frontend & backend; app demo & minor code review.
__Outcome:__ No offer.

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##Finance industry
500 employees, matched at school Job Fair
__Tech interview 1 (in-person):__ App demo; front/backend; where do you see yourself going
__Code challenge (take-home):__ Make a command-line executable that takes a `.csv` file and an optional date.  `.csv` contains investor transactions/shares purchased.  Output JSON of total cash raised, total shares, and ownership of each investor.
__HR Interview:__ why ********, where do you see yourself going
__Outcome:__ did not advance. 
__Feedback:__ code challenge doesn't include tests, doesn't validate # of arguments, created own date/error handling instead of using Ruby builtins.

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##Game/social app
100 employees, applied on LinkedIn
__HR Interview__ (phone) - why ********, career trajectory.  I asked if the position was good for a junior developer, interviewer did not know.
__Outcome:__ Did not advance.

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##Web services
500,000 employees, applied on LinkedIn
__Tech interview 1 (phone):__ Behavioral: tell about a time the status quo wasn’t good enough and what you did to change it.  Internet: What happens when you type an address in the browser bar.  What is SSL and how does it work.  HTML/CSS: Create a mockup of an accordion: box, header, content.  Tag styles vs class styles, when would you use one vs the other.  JS question: given two arrays of objects with ID keys, combine the matching IDs and return a merged array.
__Outcome:__ Did not advance.

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##Blockchain solutions
1000 employees, applied on Jumpstart
__HR Interview (phone):__ What is your favorite application of blockchain
__Video Interview:__ I missed it. Messed up the time zone.
__Outcome:__ Did not advance (shockingly).

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##Backend services
500 employees, applied on LinkedIn
__HR Interview (phone):__ Ruby on Rails experience/projects, deployment.
__Onsite Interview:__ Rails: how to break up functions into folders.  Deployment.  ActiveRecord under the hood. React Native: Navigation props. Platform-specific development. __Feedback:__ they wanted someone with more experience, but would contact in ‘a couple of weeks’ when hiring for a junior position.
__Outcome:__ Withdrew application on offer

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##Frontend agency
20 employees, applied on AngelList
__Behavioral Interview (video):__ Why ********, where do you see yourself, favorite projects, do you consider yourself an entrepreneur
__Code challenge:__ Make and host a color browser to provided spec.  Hew to layout; color cards, detail view, results pagination; color filtering/searching optional.  Made Rails API backend & React frontend, hosted on Heroku/Netlify respectively.  Feedback: good overall, though lacked proper routing.
__Outcome:__ Withdrew application on offer

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##IoT solutions
50 employees, recruiter initiated
__Tech screen (video):__ Chat with lead developer, React Native, Java, full stack vs frontend, TypeScript
__Code Challenge:__ Use two in-house tools and Node.js to subscribe to a remote feed of numbers and regularly provide an averaged summary. 
__Feedback:__ Got ‘pretty far’. Maybe jumped in too quickly without full grasp of details.
__Onsite:__ React Native: Given an array of animal objects with images, descriptions, & endangered status, show a scrolling list of cards built to a visual spec. Behavioral: client relationships, creative process, managing disagreements, learning process.
__Outcome:__ Offer accepted.

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##App agency
20 employees, recruiter initiated
__Phone screen (recruiter):__ Why an agency, experience, tools used
__Phone screen (CEO):__ Culture fit, remote work, technology enjoyed.  __Feedback:__ worried that I’m green, but willing to do a tech interview.
__Outcome:__ Withdrew application on offer.

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##Backend services
100 employees, recruiter initiated
__Phone screen (Tech Prog Mgr):__ There was none, just wanted to schedule an interview.
__Onsite:__ Algos/data structures?
__Outcome:__ Withdrew application on offer

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