I applied through other source. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at EastMeetEast
Interview
I was cold contacted through email. They had found my work online. After we got through the phone interview I was asked to do an assignment. Redesign the onboarding of their app.
Personally I find unpaid assignments to be unethical. Especially if the assignment is to redesign a part of the actual product which is essentially 'spec work'.
I would suggest in the future that assignments be more detached, "Can you please design a one pager that shows off a product that you like?".
Or...
Provide an allowance so that it doesn't feel like free sweat labor. It doesn't have to be much just a symbolic gesture so that the candidate isn't being ask for something for nothing...
Which leads me to the second red flag...
I did the assignment anyway and shipped it off. I didn't hear back, over two days, and so I followed up and was told I would receive a response in the coming week. It's been months and I haven't heard anything. I would have expected at the very least an update response - "Thanks, but we're going to pursue other candidates".
Honestly, I would never work for this company. My treatment indicates that they have little to no experience working with designers. The lack of respect is a massive red flag and their assignment ask is doubly so. It takes a modicum of mutual respect to fire off an email update.
I would warn other designers against interviewing here.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at EastMeetEast (New York, NY) in Feb 2019
Interview
I had a brief call with the HR manager who gave an overview of the company, then received a link to a code test online. The code test was very easy and consisted of DOM manipulation, basic JavaScript functions, and a SQL query. After they reviewed the test, they invited me for a two hour onsite interview.
Before the interview, I conducted significant research on the company so that I could ask intelligent questions. When I found that they posted their employee's LinkedIn profile picture to Twitter as an advertisement with a false name and location and the hashtag "hotsian" I became uncomfortable.
During the onsite, I met with three members of the management team:
The first person was completely unprepared for the interview and had nothing to say except asking me if I had questions for them. They didn't answer my questions satisfactorily and we only met for about 10-15 minutes.
I spoke with the second person for over an hour. They explained why they made certain technical decisions, showed me a project they wanted to improve, and asked me questions about my experience.
The third person asked me some behavioral questions. When I asked them about their company culture, they couldn't articulate it and just said they have all kinds of people.
After the interview I received feedback that I was not a good culture fit and that I didn't confidently answer coding questions.
I agree that I wasn't a good culture fit because, based on feeling uncomfortable after doing research, I was not as outgoing as I would normally be. However, there were no coding questions asked during the onsite interview.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at EastMeetEast in Nov 2018
Interview
Recruiter contacted me but didn't respond back till after 3 attempts of me reaching out. I spoke with the friendly HR person there. I was asked to do a multiple choice test using some testing website.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Multiple choice test with fill-in. The test is not a good indicator of whether a candidate is a good software engineer. A better one would be having the candidate build a small app, or feature and then discussing the code with an engineer there.
