Tech screen followed by a Byteboard interview split up into two sections.
Tech screen was very pleasant and accommodating to my schedule. Gave me a good idea of what to expect in the role and asked a few questions to gauge what team I might be a good fit for.
First code screen is outsourced to a third party. Which is usually a bit of a red flag for me, but decided to give it a chance since I've never used Byteboard before. The first being a 40 min tech doc review. Admittedly this portion was really frustrating as you aren't really given enough time to fully read and grasp what is being asked of of you.
By the time I finished reading the doc, I had 7-10mins left and then had to run back through, reading the comments, understanding what they were asking, and then responding with suggestions + pros & cons.
Imagine going into a completely new job where you have zero context of the app, their goals, their frameworks, or their data sources. Then being expected to comment & make suggestions in the first 30 minutes of being given a very high level overview. I would slightly be concerned with any engineer who would be comfortable doing that.
I think the expectation is for interviewees to just comment as they read through, but I always try to make a point of reading through the entire document and fully understanding the goals before moving on to make suggestions or comments.
The second portion was a 70 minute coding assessment. Which again, didn't really feel like enough time to fully grasp the codebase and deliver optimal solutions.
I would say without the time constraints, the difficulty of this interview would be easy to average. With the constraints however, it's both difficult and seems to favor devs who just jump right in based on the specifications and nothing else.
Overall, wouldn't say this was negative or positive. I'm sure the right type of person would thrive in this interview style.
Sollicitatievragen [1]
Vraag 1
Building an app that allows friends to choose a midpoint between to reduce travel time for a specific activity.
How would you support more than two friends?
With one database per city, how would you scale as the app grows?
How would you optimize the algorithm for suggested activities based on data provided?
How would you handle private data and allowing users to customize what their friends see in the profile?
Similar questions all the way through.
Coding portion was implementing a function responsible for suggesting a midpoint based on a users coordinates and a number of filters. Not too bad once you understand what is being asked. Though there are a lot of assumptions that need to be made off jump to get through all 3 tasks within the time limit.