I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2018
Interview
Applied for a SDE position. Recruiter was very fast in responding. Set up an initial 30 minute phone chat to talk over your resume, technologies you worked on, etc. Next step was a one hour technical phone screen.
For the phone screen, I paired with a senior developer who is not a member of the team I applied for. Understandable but this also caused some problems with the interview direction. My interviewer must have been looking for questions based on my resume and since he saw the words "full stack" the first question he asked involved making 3 letters in separate divs be aligned into 3 columns (bonus for responsive design) on a simulated web page by making CSS changes. While I have worked with CSS before that's not what I'd consider my area of expertise and would certainly not be able to whip something like this up within 10 minutes. If I had prepared for it beforehand then certainly (I mean, it's CSS not red black trees) but the team I was applying into does not mention web development at all (the recruiter said they are working with Python) so I was not expecting to be tested on CSS stuff. So obviously, I bumbled around for 10 minutes and must have looked like an idiot.
If I were to judge I'd say that the next question didn't go so well either. I'd say that the question was initially poorly worded and included no examples of the expected input and outputs, something I'd normally expect to see. As a consequence, I initially programmed in the wrong direction and had to fix my approach after the interviewer clarified the question. That led to some messiness.
One piece of advice I'd like to offer to the interviewers at Zillow, if you're reading this, is not to make specific assumptions of what you candidates may or may not have done based on their resume. I came into the interview expecting to be asked architecture, data structure, and algorithms problems typically expected from the back-end position I applied for and instead was thrown way off by a CSS question as if I am primarily a web developer (which if you couldn't tell already, I am NOT). Who knows, maybe I'm a brilliant at solving your back end challenges but alas, we'll never know now will we?
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
GIVEN:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Sample Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="wrapper">
<div>A</div>
<div>B</div>
<div>C</div>
</div>
</body>
USING CSS:
// Make a 3 column layout that is:
// • Is the full width of the page
// • Has even width columns
// • Gutter space in between (width doesn't matter, just an even gap between each is fine.)
// • Responsive. Stack the columns on displays narrower than 320px
// For a challenge try:
// • Make the center column wider than the outer two.
// • Make the first column (A) appear farthest too the right- without changing the markup order
//
// Browser should look like this:
// -------------
// |A |B |C |
// | | | |
// | | | |
// | | | |
// -------------
//
// Make a simple function that returns the minimum value of 0 or more integers. Without using builtins such as Math.min(), etc.
// example: [6, 2, 33, -3, 3, 6, 10, -1] should return -3
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Los Angeles, CA)
Interview
Had a 30 min zoom audio interview and was given 1 LC question, then two weeks later was notified I made it to the final round which consist of 2 one hour interview. For the first interview I was given two LC type question and solved it and for the second interview I was given just one question. All LC type question. Was given the offer about 2 weeks later. Whole process was about a month and so
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Zillow in Aug 2021
Interview
I got contacted by a recruiter after my 3rd application.
They set up a typical HR phone screen to talk about the job and my background. The recruiter seemed new to their job and just read straight off the job description and asked scripted questions without really introducing themselves. They didn't seem to know much about tech and couldn't answer any of my questions about the position besides what was listed on the job description. I thought it might have been an intern doing the call. I was moved to the next stage for a ~1 hour technical Hackerrank screen.
The technical screen started off with very brief introductions and moved straight to coding without any behavioral questions like others on here said they received; I'm not sure if I passed the vibe check immediately so they decided to pass on the behaviorals or what.(?) I was asked 2 questions that were around LC medium.
The first question I misunderstood to start (find Fibonacci sum, but I thought it was just regular Fibonacci until I was corrected) and ended up solving in O(n) time after a little fumbling. The interviewer asked if there was a faster approach, to which I said I didn't think so. I looked it up after the interview and there is an O(log(n)) solution that involves recognizing a math trick, but I doubt anybody who doesn't already know the answer going in to the interview would recognize it. I think this question was poor and doesn't have any real life application to what your average developer would ever do.
The second question I recognized two possible approaches. I stated how I would do the slower O(n) brute force approach and what it's run time would be, and then proceeded to code the faster O(log(n)) binary search approach. I got the faster approach correct-ish with one mistake that I fixed after a hint from the interviewer. I wrote some test cases prior to fixing the mistake and they all passed, so in hindsight I was missing a single test case. The interviewer tried a little to guide me to recognize that I was missing the test case, but I think the stress of the interview situation and their hints being a little too vague for me to pick up on caused me to not recognize the missing test case. I was beating myself up about that when I realized it an hour after the interview had ended, but hoped they would overlook a minor mistake and give me a chance at an onsite (that's why we work in teams, right? to help catch mistakes?).
Unfortunately I got a rejection email the next day. It sucks to be rejected for not having pre-hand knowledge of a problem and/or not being perfect in another problem in a 40 minute interview, but I guess it is what it is :(.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA)
Interview
HR Screen, Tech Screen, 4 hour on-site. Each on-site interview had at least 1 LC medium, barely any mobile questions which I applied for. I had a more practical interview at Google. Won’t be applying again because how on earth are they finding mobile engineers by asking them to memorize the iterative Fibonacci sequence. Waste of my time tbh
