I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Color (San Francisco, CA) in May 2022
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn and I agreed to have a quick HR call with him, which I thought went well. Then he set up a phone screen with an engineer, where I was asked the MS Paint question that others have shared here. I don't think I did my best work—I had prepared a lot for a FAANG interview that happened 2 days prior so I had brushed up on algorithms and data structures, but my brain just wasn't working its best that day. For that reason, I thought that I probably wouldn't move further in the interview process. However, based on the first HR call it sounded like they were desperate to hire engineers so I thought maybe they'd give me a second chance.
It's been over a month since that interview and I haven't heard anything from them—they just completely ghosted me. I reached back out to the recruiter and to the person who set up my interview and neither of them have replied. It's very frustrating since they were the ones that reached out to me. I wish that they would have had the decency to just tell me no—based on my interview performance I would have understood. Leaving me hanging is much worse and makes them seem unprofessional and inconsiderate of my time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It's been several weeks so I may not remember everything, but it's the same MS Paint clone that others have shared here. No user interface is required, just a few functions such as paint and undo. You should be able to undo multiple times. The input is an array of strings which represent individual pixels' colors, and the output is the new array of strings after the change (paint or undo) has been made.
Screening call with a recruiter follow by a technical interview.
The question was the same paint question that others have posted about. The interview seemed to go well, and I solved the problem, and all of the interviewer's test cases. However, I received a rejection e-mail a few hours later.
Overall, seemed to be a waste of time. Seems odd to have just one person be the gate-keeper instead of having a hiring panel like most companies.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Create a Painter class. The same question that others have posted about.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Color (Burlingame, CA)
Interview
The process consisted of 2 coding interviews, 1 system design interview, and 1 behavioral interview with manager. The interviewers were all friendly and patient. We didn't even compile the code I wrote, we just talked through it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Rest APIs, basic coding (any language was fine), OOP patterns
The interview process started with an informal HR call and then a phone screen. The phone screen was scheduled with a senior engineer but instead someone else joined in with no clue on how to interview. I was not given time for introduction and the interview jumped right into the coding question. They were using Codility platform and I was unfamiliar with the platform. The link to the shared pad was given on the spot so I had no time to get comfortable with the platform. The interviewer offered NO HELP whatsoever even when I explicitly asked "How do I run this?" They said - I'm not sure. So I had to spend time figuring it out by myself and after going through my code and testing it, they mentioned a use case that I missed for which I had to restructure my entire code. I kept asking if I was going in the right direction but no helpful response or hints. The interviewer was just staring at me the whole time.
At the end of the call, I got to know that the interviewer has been been in the company for 6 months so I got no insight whatsoever into the company culture, the team responsibilities, etc.
Overall a very bad experience, I won't be engaging with this company again.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
MS Paint Question:
Given a canvas (list of lists of str)
1. Paint(x, y, color): do canvas[x][y] = color, keep track of all actions performed here for the undo() & redo()
2. Undo(): undo the last performed action (this can be done multiple times and go as far as the first action)
3. Redo(): redo the last undo action (this can be done multiple times and go as far as the first undo)