I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Pocket Gems (San Mateo, CA) in Feb 2017
Interview
Pocket Gems is very generous with giving interviews. My friend in PocketGems referred me and I received online coding test instantly. I did some preparations for several days.
Before I was going to do the coding test, I found the ESTIMATED time of the test is 1h50min, but the ACTUAL time they gave is 1h15min! I emailed them asking if this is intended. After two days I finally got the response saying "This is a mistake, we fixed it".
Do you believe it? If you believe it, the two-day delay and the mistake are still very unprofessional.
Personally I think setting the time to 1h15min is a way to raise the hiring bar intentionally and sneakily. I don't want to judge people like that, but the thought made me feel uncomfortable.
The coding challenge is not too difficult, but it's not trivial. I made the most things right and I was 90% on the way (Minor bugs prevent my code passing the unit tests). I explained the situation and hoped they gave me a chance for the phone interview, because I heard some people still got phone interviews without finishing the online test before. But the next day, an auto generated decline. Every email during the process was auto-generated except the email "we fixed it". Yeah they are generous with giving interviews, but they are also generous with declining people.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Lymtus challenge, one post below has the exact questions. It's even more difficult than the phone interview questions, since you don't need to pass unit tests in the phone interviews.
You need to parse the text such as time and graph information and then process them. It's tough to get your code 100% right and pass the unit tests.
I received an email from an HR after participating in an online competition. The first round was an online coding interview with an engineer from their team. I did not go beyond the telephonic round.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Find the lowest common ancestor in a binary search tree.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Pocket Gems in Mar 2022
Interview
OA with 2 medium problems & a code review, 1-hour 1st round technical interview followed by 3 consecutive 1-hour technical interviews.
The interviewers were all super nice. They were willing to work together towards a solution when I needed some subtle hints. They were very polite, engaged and eager to chat.
Got the offer pretty shortly after my last interview
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Medium leetcode questions, graphs & hashmaps are your friends.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Pocket Gems in Nov 2021
Interview
I was given a Hackerrank to complete after a few weeks of waiting for a response. Just some common leetcode style questions in hackerranks. I didn't do so well though so received the rejection email a few days later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Hackerrank questions I don't really remember specifics.
Thank you so much for being transparent with your experience interviewing. We are really looking forward to having you here at Pocket Gems!
Pocket Gems response
4y
Thank you for sharing your experience with us. We thank you for your time put in with us even if it did not work out in the end. Wishing you all the best!