I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at CitizenNet (Los Angeles, CA) in Oct 2019
Interview
There was a timed, online skills evaluation that was fairly challenging. Then a short, informal phone "screen" which I put in quotes because it was not with an HR person but another engineer, which was nice. During the phone call, we scheduled a 3 hour on-site interview, which seemed intimidating at first. However, when I got there the mood was generally easy-going. I met with the CEO first, then had 2 or 3 separate group interviews. There was some live coding during the interview with the team that the position was for. It felt almost a little more like pair programming (of course with less input from them than the usual pair programming) because it was conversational rather than them giving me a task and just watching and judging me in silence. The people were great, which is why I did take the offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
(something like) What is your debugging process?/What are some tools you use? [job was Python specific]
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at CitizenNet (Los Angeles, CA) in Aug 2019
Interview
Was initially contacted through Linkedin after submitting my resume to a job posting. They responded immediately with a coding challenge. Passed the coding challenge and they immediately invited me in for a 3 hour interview in person. Was told only 5 out of 100+ people passed the test.
4 engineers from the team interviewed me at the same time. 2 of the interviewees were there via web conference but thought it was pretty important to talk over the two people who were actually in the room with me. They were basically trying to impress each other with their ability to find issues in my code instead of giving me time to look it over. Then they said I didn't know enough about python coding for the job about 20 minutes in. Could have easily done the prompt they were asking for in about 15 minutes if they just let me code instead of breathing down my neck.
Generally it seemed as though everyone at this company is overworked but well compensated. They are looking for robots to code, not employees that they will spend 8 hrs/day with 5 days a week for the rest of their career. Every mistake I made in the interview could have been taught and absorbed in 10 minutes. Sociability unfortunately cannot be taught in 10 minutes, but is paid no mind in the interview process here.
The relationships between employees seemed pretty strangely strained as well. While chatting about LACMA being around the corner an employee who went to school in India said he had never been there and another jokingly said "I will pay for you to go there so that we can culture you." Yikes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They wanted me to take a function I had written in python in the coding challenge and make it run in the command line with variables inputted in command line. Then wanted to see how I would handle bad status codes and bad requests to the API in the code.