The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Perpetua
Interview
There are a total of five parts to the process:
1. HR style interview; they ask pretty generic behavioural questions with a fairy simple technical question at the end (~30 mins)
2. Leetcode style interview they ask 2 algorithm questions, first one is fairly easy second one is slightly harder. (~45 mins)
3. Take home assignment where you build a simple backend api (~3 hours of work)
4. Code review interview, you go over your take home with someone on the backend team and explain trade-offs/design choices (~45 mins)
5. Panel style interview, with 3 rounds. First round is architecture style question where they give you a very general problem and you give a broad overview of the system design you would use, this part was pretty hand wavey. Second round is product interview where you talk members of the Product team about the company and their product, questions were mainly about how you interacted with product managers in your past roles. Third round was very strange I don't know how to describe this one, it was with 2 backend engineers; first I was asked about a past project and how I would scale it up, then I was asked a leetcode easy problem and asked to come up with as many solutions as I could for it. I managed to come up with 4 solutions (although apparently there was a fifth I couldn't come up with). (this part took 3 hours)
Overall the entire process took 8 hours over a month of my life which is way too long imo, what is the point of the 5th interview....also it felt so unstructured why bother asking technical questions in the 1st interview if there's technical round in the second interview. And what is the point of the take home assignment if you're going to ask my a bunch of architecture questions in the 5th interview can't you just look at my code. The entire 5th round felt way too hand wavey and pointless. My biggest feedback would be to either cut the take home out or just get rid of the 5th round and maybe extend the code review to an hour (probably just take out the 5th round). If I knew this process would take this long I probably wouldn't have bothered applying, this is the longest interview process I've done so far, even much larger well known more competitive companies (google, apple, amazon) don't have a process that takes this long. Also ask all of the technical questions is one part of the process why were there random leetcode questions scattered throughout the entire 5 step process it made no sense or just have multiple shorter technical rounds if you don't want a super long technical round. Last piece of feedback I have is you should tell the candidates ahead of time what the interview process is going to be like and the time commitment needed, if I was told in the first round that this process would take 8 hours I wouldn't have bothered continuing.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Basically this coding question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-element-appears-array-every-element-appears-twice/
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The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Perpetua in Oct 2020
Interview
There were three rounds of interviews:
1. Initial "HR screen" type questions and a technical component at the end
2. Take-home assignment + followup where you go through the code with two members of the engineering team
3. Final technical interview with a team lead
Everyone I met during this process was super friendly and I particularly liked how my final interviewer was really invested in my personal projects and asked lots of follow-up questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What would you say your biggest failure was, and how did you learn from it?