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      Ruby On Rails Developer Interview

      14 May 2013
      Anonymous interview candidate
      San Francisco, CA
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied in-person. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Goodreads (San Francisco, CA) in Sept 2012

      Interview

      I met M.E. at an event and we talked briefly. I think I contacted him by email and I ended up coming in for an interview. The receptionist was really nice, but on the whole the place was dim and dull and no one was really interacting with anyone else. They have this cute thing where each conference room is painted with a book theme, but I kid you not, the open office plan was like a weird dungeon - very gray and lifeless looking. First I had a phone interview which was really just a lot of ruby/programming/MVC basics, not hard at all. Exchanged emails, then set up an in-person time. I was interviewed by three people on my first day there. We did programming problems on a whiteboard, which I was decent at, and played a weird card game which I then had to write a program to simulate; I pair-programmed with the interviewer on this one. I got called in again for another round of interviews about a week later, and same kinda routine - whiteboarding, chatting, one product guy even had me draw a bunch of UI scenarios on a whiteboard, which was a little strange but I went with it and talked everything out with him. I was interviewed by four people I believe this time. On my way out I ran into M.E. and tried to say hi and chat for a moment. He didn't make good eye contact which was slightly awkward, but I guess that's how some people are. So all told, it was nearly ten interviews, and over two weeks total, and in the end, they simply didn't go with me. C'est la vie!

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Most difficult was probably a moderately complicated SQL query.. at the time I had been doing lots of rails and my head was not in the pure SQL mode at all. It was my fault for not brushing up on that before coming in, but I did my best and talked it out as I wrote it. I got the entirety of the idea correct and the majority of the syntax correct, but some of it was a little railsified out of lack of wholly memorized SQL syntax.
      1 Answer
      4