I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Pocket Gems (San Francisco, CA) in Sep 2021
Interview
Talked with recruiter. Nice guy. Talked about focus areas for senior engineering manager role. Included coding, leadership, people mgmt, and system design. I was surprised coding was required for senior management position and requested the coding interview first, since I haven't done daily coding for a few years and I didn't want to waste time with the other interviews if this was going to be an issue.
Phone interview was two weeks later. It was a shared HackerRank screen with no video. The HR screen was not setup to actually compile and run the code. It was just a shared screen used to write and describe the code. The questions are listed below. I completed them in about 30 minutes.
The interview was a bit awkward. The interviewer was nice, but very reserved, and the conversation was very stilted. At the end, when I was asking questions, I found out he doesn't review the candidates resume or experience prior to the interview, nor does he ask questions during the interview, so as not to bias his grading. This explains the awkwardness.
Since we couldn't compile/run the code, after the interview, I coded the problem in my own IDE and verified that my code worked as written.
One week after the interview I received a generic "no-reply" email stating that they were passing on me. No feedback, so it's unclear why. Maybe, I wasn't fast enough with my coding???
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1) Write a node class with data members of string value, and a container of neighboring nodes.
2) Write a method to find a node given a target value and initial node.