Baynote Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – General speaking I have gotten a telephon ring and spoke with recuiter who asking me different questions I know to say.
   I was in Baynote office and talked with people. One was a big hairy man, I am so scaring. He want to win me in this interview. This is not good when interviewer has angry and generally speaking wants commonly to win. I see this is workshop for concrete agitation. Recuiter had to take notice of safe me that Baynote have angry co-workers.

Interview Details – The interviewer asked a few technical question that involved mostly coding and logic with collection, data structure, and performance issue. One brain teaser. They were very nice and energetic.

Negotiation Details – It was very simple and easy, was able to increase my stock options by 33%. I made a mistake however of naming my own salary. I would recommend interviewee insist on the employer to make a offer that they seem fair

Interview Details – It was a wonderful technical interview/discussion with the hiring manager who I think is the Director. She seemed to have immense knowledge of Data. I commend her for being technically strong, trying to hire top-notch candidates to deliver Data Warehouse solutions with new technologies. Even though I was rejected, it was indeed challenging to discuss various technical questions. Would have loved to work in such a team/company..

Interview Details – I was referred to Baynote through a friend who knew someone there. My interview consisted of a series of 1:1 face-to-face interviews. The process was not that different from the interview process at most other Silicon Valley startups, but I was impressed with a few things:

* People were true professionals
* They clearly cared about their jobs
* They were very honest about the challenges the company had. This was particularly refreshing.

Overall, the experience was a truly positive one. The people I talked to was the biggest reason I took Baynote's offer.

Interview Details – My interview was broken into three sessions in which I was interviewed via phone to determine which portion of the product I wanted to work on, wrote a CRUD php application, and asked basic Computer Science questions (e.g., depth-first search). The interviewers were very respectful and asked questions that were relevant specifically to the type of work I would be doing at the company.

Interview Details – I found out about Baynote from my old boss who was recently hired there. I had really liked working for him before, and Baynote's technology seemed interesting. After I told him I was interested, company recruiter got into the act and set up a half day of interviews with a few different folks was set up for a few days later.

My first interview was with my prospective manager. After a bit of chit chat he gave me a simple design problem. I talked about various issues, different sorts of designs trade offs, asked a few questions, and then described a design. He then made the problem more complex, introducing multiple users, distributed design, etc, and asked how I'd enhance/change the design. And again I discussed a few options, asked questions, and proposed a design. We did this another time or two and our time was up. I forget when during the interview, but also asked many questions about what the company was like, and what the product was like.

I next met with a couple of the engineers from my prospective team. Again a bit of chit chat and on to a coding question. They posed a problem and I wrote some java code to solve it. We talked a bit about the problem and solution and discussed various issues. After we'd finished with the coding problem they asked a few questions from my resume', especially a couple of gigs I'd had that lasted only two years. I explained that I stayed at a company while I had new and challenging problems to work on. Sometimes that's two years, sometimes that's five, and sometimes a startup crashes and burns first. I had basically one question and asked each for their answer: are you still having fun. Big smiles and descriptions of what they were doing and why they liked what they did and their excitement about the future.

My last interview that day was with the platform team architect. We talked about a few projects I'd worked on in the past. Then moved on to another coding problem. After writing the code, some questions and discussion. Then the problem was made more interesting. Couple more iterations of this and we shifted away from coding to more of the design issues. And a couple more iterations of that. After wrapping that up I asked a few questions about the challenges facing Baynote with respect to the code base and the design limitations. And time was up and off I went.

On the way out spoke with my old boss and he said he'd get back to me.

Next day was contacted by the recruiter and set up an interview with the CTO. This was a less technical interview, more of a personal interview. Make sure he felt comfortable with me. And gave me a chance to ask him a few questions. Including: was he still passionate about BayNote. Yep, with much detail.

And had an offer a few days later.

I really liked everyone I spoke with. Everyone was really relaxed and personable. Folks kicked back and just talked.

As a candidate you find out as much about your interviewers and they do about you, at least if you do it right. When they brought up a technical issue with something I proposed, the ensuing discussion gave me as much opportunity to evaluate them as it gave them to evaluate me. I came away very impressed. Everyone was quite sharp and could defend their opinions. Everyone was willing to reevaluate their positions based on my statements, they were egoless with no raging arrogance. It was really a lot of fun talking to everyone.

Negotiation Details – I don't do a whole lot of negotiation. I tell folks what I want/expect. If I get it and I like the company I'll take the job. Of course, I don't try to get every last nickel, I'm in this work for the fun, and let's face it, programmers get paid a ton of money if they are any good, so I think I'm easy to please with an offer.

Interview Details – Hiring manager sources candidates from a few recruiters. The hiring manager requests a write-up of why the candidates want to apply for the post (e.g. why i love your company) before 1:1 interview (no phone screening).

Hiring manager just joined the company for 1 month, and has specific assumptions/expectation. He has very abrasive body language - put his legs on the table at the beginning of interview. If you don't reply with the expected buzz words, he will use very blunt and impolite words. This is probably just a negative experience, not associated with the company.

Interview Details – The process started with a phone screen, and was following by a 3 hour programming assignment which I sent over email. I only spent about an hour on the assignment. Came in for a round of interviews over ~4 hours, meeting most of the engineering team. They invited back a week later for another ~5 hours of interviews with the remainder of the team. I was given an offer the following week.

Interview Details – BayNote has had some management turnover and the interviewing process was long as a result. The new team is very talented, very energized and generally has the company focused in the right direction--all good news.

I had a 1 on 1 interview with the hiring manager in person--he later explained that for management positions he puts much more emphasis on team fit and human dynamics that he would rather invest the time to meet candidates in person rather than asking some random questions over the phone. That logic is unassailable.

The interview consisted of basic scaling questions, java questions around threading, basic algorithms and many more on people and situations. I think I was very well represented during the interview.

The next interview more technical in nature and with the team that I would lead. There were both technical (front-end and back-end) and behavioral questions; all were relatively easy and again did justice to who I am.

The next interview was with the leadership of the company and I suppose was mostly for fit.

I received an offer soon after and after negotiating, I accepted and started soon after.

Overall, I met a lot of smart and positive people, got to understand some of the problems they had (and for which they needed my help). I really came to appreciate healthy changes happening at BayNote. I also think they got a pretty good handle on who I am and what I am about--perhaps better than anyone else.

I consider it a win-win.

Negotiation Details – Yes, I negotiated. I represented to the hiring manager what I thought I was worth in good faith. He took my thoughts and made adjustments. I didn't get everything that I wanted but I think the give and take was fair.