Lulu.com Software Engineer Interview Questions

After the on-site interview I have some serious doubts about this company's future, and would recommend engineers avoid it due to hints of a bad working environment. Started with a phone screen with a lead, then on-site with different groups. Almost all the on-site was personality/soft-skills questions with a little light discussion of their tech stack (a bit of a mess, but that's not rare). One trivial coding problem, but to be honest they didn't go deep enough to see if my technical skills were good or not. It felt like my skills were less important than willingness to put up with the chaotic environment, and they emphasized solving problems *fast* over doing them right. Final interview was where it really went bad, with a senior executive. He came off very egocentric and not particularly pleasant, and bragged about how an effective manager could run a technical company without knowing anything about tech. Basically: "I don't need to understand this to make decisions about it." Questions about the future plans for LuLu yielded suggested that after being crushed by Amazon's publishing arm, they were going to try to cater to some (very small) niche markets. I think the final straw was that he pushed for an early start date if hired and wouldn't accept a few extra weeks to allow for knowledge transfer. Also seemed horribly offended that I wouldn't reveal where else I was interviewing. All in all: it feels like the company had very shaky leadership vision (not surprising with the turnover), a significant amount of technical debt and architecture issues, and didn't place much value on technical competence. Of course I didn't let any of this show, but still it was not a good impression to make.