I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Intercom (Dublin, Dublin) in Jul 2016
Interview
Applied online and received an email from a recruiter to go over recruiter screen via Skype and received an assignment email to complete within few days including details to follow stereotype guidelines while submitting the code. They were expecting a candidate to spend several hours during the current job to come up with a codebase with test cases. Personally, I do not like such stereotype thinking rather go with the candidate on a coding round with an interviewer who can observe candidates thought process and idea of implementation.
Submitted code with production standards and received email stating:
"You provided a thoughtful answer regarding the tool you had written to keep a data pipeline working well. We liked that it worked well and was well received - great job
Unfortunately, however, we're not going to proceed with your application this time, as we feel other candidates have come closer to what we're looking for, particularly in the area of production ready code and automated tests. We've decided to focus on more senior candidates with substantial programming experience."
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q1. What's your proudest achievement? It can be a personal project or something you've worked on professionally. Just a short paragraph is fine, but I'd love to know why you're proud of it.
Q2. Write some code, that will flatten an array of arbitrarily nested arrays of integers into a flat array of integers. e.g. [[1,2,[3]],4] -> [1,2,3,4].
Q3. In the file public_access.log.txt, you'll find a standard HTTP access log ... something that we all need to parse from time to time, usually in the heat of an outage. Create a command line script called weblog_helper that can provide the two features listed below:
- Return all log lines that correspond to a given source IP address
- Return all log lines that correspond to a given IP CIDR network
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Intercom (Dublin, Dublin) in Sep 2016
Interview
I'd an initial chat with some senior people, to make sure that it was a good fit for me. I stressed I was interested in a proper work-life balance rather than a multinational that needed 55 hours a week and lots of late evenings talking to the US.
We had some system design discussions, very heavy on "What did you do previously, did you understand it, and can you communicate it", rather than theoretical game-based interview questions.
The coding interview was kinda soft - they weren't looking for someone who was a superb algorithms/data structures expert, more someone who could work with other people. This came across in other parts of the interview too.
The "Culture" interview with a senior manager and HR was really enjoyable - I got the impression they were asking about things I thought were important; being open, being honest, being OK giving and receiving feedback, supporting people, looking for people with a 'growth mindset' and 'high potential' rather than over-achievers or high-growth-trajectory.
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