Rearden Commerce Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Apr 2009 in Foster City, CA (took 2 weeks)

The phone technical screens were straightforward (as they asked some basic, intermediate and advanced Java questions, as well as general questions on HTTP and servlets).

I had two on-site interviews, each lasting about 2-3 hours. The format for each interviewer was to ask a IQ puzzler and then a coding question. The IQ questions were: tossing two eggs off a building (a popular question lifted from Google's repertoire), computing the angle between the minute and hour hands of a clock and devising a way for representing VCR+ codes in a small amount of bits (yes I know, quite retro but a decent question). The Java questions themselves are not particularly difficult, although they did ask an open-ended OO-design question asking how to design an elevator system.

Round One actually went reasonably well for me, so they called me in for round two. Sadly, I was doomed from the start: for a reason that is inexplicable to me - the interviewer's mannerism made it clear that he did not approve of my candidacy. Despite the fact that I was able to implement a hash table from scratch using only Java primitives and explain how to make it thread-safe (we are talking basic stuff here). But, when I asked him about the corporate culture of Rearden Commerce his bias against me became clear when he responded: "We are *results* driven". His tone of voice suggested that somehow he concluded that I am somehow not results driven. My past experience, rave reviews and monotonically increasing salary history begs to differ.

Needless to say: I did not receive an offer from this company. And until clairvoyance has been proven as a valid tool for interviewers, be prepared for such unprofessionalism if you interview with Rearden Commerce. Speaking of unprofessionalism, a hiring manager also admitted to me that the MO of engineers at this company is to tell their coworkers "your code sucks!". Perhaps I should consider myself spared.