I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at EarnIn (Palo Alto, CA) in Aug 2017
Interview
(Note: I did not go through a technical phone screen with Activehours.)
The on-site consisted of a full day of interviews, comprising 5 ~1-hour interviews with engineers from Activehours. The topics ranged fairly widely, but seemed to focus on sussing out my strengths rather than looking for any skills in advance. The interviews were almost entirely skills-based, without much focus on previous experience. However, they did place a big emphasis on making sure that I was a culture and personality fit as well.
Activehours got back to me with an offer the next day.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Design a system to handle the shopping cart portion of an online shop. It should be able to handle adding and removing items from the cart, as well as checking out and paying. It should be able to handle multiple forms of payment, such as card, check, PayPal, and Bitcoin. How would you structure this system?
We have a 4x4 grid, and we know there's a mouse trapped in one of the cells. We want to figure out which cell it's in, but we can only ask queries of the following form: given a subset of the cells, we can "scan" our grid and know whether there's a mouse within that subset or not, but not where it is.
How would we figure out where the mouse is using the fewest number of scans?
FOLLOW UP: How would we do this if there were two mice?