I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Expend (London, England) in Oct 2022
Interview
TL;DR: The interview process was great - everyone I met was friendly, there were no "gotcha" questions and it felt like at the end of the process they had a good understanding of who I was & how I work, and I also had a good understanding of Expend and the engineering team. Everyone I met was extremely friendly and I felt like they wanted me to do well, which is always a very good sign when interviewing (you'll have to work with these people after all!). More detail: I interviewed at a *lot* of different places and Expend had the best process by far. Expend has gone through a lot of changes in the engineering team in the last ~6 months, and so while I'm sure the previous experiences given here were valid, they were nothing like my own. It was a 2-stage interview, first a discussion with the CTO around my experience and past-projects. This is a very conversational interview and there are no gotcha questions, the purpose is for them to get a better understanding of you & your experience, your opinion on various tech topics, as well as anything else that comes up during the interview. This is a great opportunity to talk about what you're passionate about and is honestly more of a conversation than an interview. After that, the 2nd stage is a ~2 hour live coding experience. This was so, so much fun! Instead of asking you to solve some abstract algorithmic questions, you get a github repo to pull down, you run it locally and you work with your interviewers to implement some functionality, fix some bugs etc. It was a full stack role that I was applying for and so the repository was a node server with a react front-end. They don't sit in silence and watch you code, it really is a collaborative process where you bounce ideas off each other, try something, discuss the trade-offs etc. Really good fun :) As I said in my TL;DR at the beginning, it was a really fun and enjoyable interview process which felt like it actually gave the Expend team a good understanding of who I am as a person and an engineer, something which so many interview processes fail at.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There weren't really any specific questions, as I said it's more of a discussion and the live coding is very collaborative, they don't have a specific list of questions to ask you (well maybe they do and I didn't realise!)
