I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Hearsay Systems (Minneapolis, MN)
Interview
This is one the coolest and quickest interviews I've ever had. Even though I wasn't moved to the next stage, I really enjoyed talking to the folks unlike other companies who never gives an opportunity to tell about you.
The process started like this
1. Recruiter contacted me through LinkedIn. She was very upfront with skills match, compensation and scheduled the next round with the hiring manager.
2. Hiring manager - This gentleman is the coolest manager I've met. The interview was more a casual chat, with some tech talks in between but I've never met tech guy who was able to connect with anyone and drive interesting conversations.
The interview went 10 mins over time because he answered all questions including tech stack, culture and teams.
Besides that, I appreciate the time they give to the candidates to talk and ask questions. This is extremely important and I note this very carefully to determine the company's culture, and not just some interviewer bragging about their culture and keep cutting you off in between.
I would have accepted the role if they offered me one, at least for bosses like this! Unfortunately, they decided to close out this opening due to whatsoever reasons.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1 STAR questions.
2. Basic questions on Cloud native apps
3. system design
4. casual chat
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Hearsay Systems in Oct 2014
Interview
I was contacted by one of their internal recruiters who got my information from Angel List. The recruiter was very nice and shared lots of information about the company and the team with me, we ended up having two long phone interviews where I shared my past experiences, knowledge, etc...
After the two phone interviews with this recruiter I had the first technical interview with one of their engineers.
The interview started on time, the engineer was very clear and patient with the technical questions and he was both polite and supportive. The interview consisted of a few algorithm questions, and one SQL question. After the first technical interview I was called by the recruiter telling me that their engineer thought I did great and they scheduled a second phone technical interview.
This second and last technical interview was a joke. The person called me almost 10 minutes after the scheduled time, and then he introduced himself as a development manager. It sounded as he wasn't ready for this call as I could hear someone trying to talk to him or perhaps it was just people talking nearby. He sounded young and inexperienced to do a technical interview. He did not apologize for being late to the call and instead said the following "since you already spoke to our recruiter and another software engineer I don't need to know about yourself. Let's start with some technical questions". I said OK and so we started. The question was a bit vague, he did not explain it just pasted it onto one of those code sharing sites and asked for me to solve it. I started by asking questions and most of his answers where limited to saying "sure...". The interview was scheduled to be 45 minutes, as he was late to the interview we only spent about 30 minutes on it. About 15 minutes after I started the code exercise he stopped me and said that it was OK and asked me if I had any questions. I was disappointed as he did not provide enough time or details about the code exercise.
In the end, I asked a few questions, and his responses where vague. He was not in it, he was distracted by someone or something as every time I asked a question all I heard was silence and then a few seconds later he asked me to repeat the question again. I did, and both of his answers for my two questions where the same.. "sure, I think that is right".
While the experience on this second technical interview was very disappointing, I still had open and was excited about the opportunity as both the recruiter and the person who conducted the first technical interview where very polite, just nice people over the phone. Two days later I got an email from the recruiter telling me that the second technical interview did not go well according to the person who conducted the interview and that was all.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Bad formulated question about returning a string representing the number of times a given integer is found within a string (by the way this is my interpretation of the question, it wasn't as clear as this).