I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Smarkets (Los Angeles, CA) in Apr 2018
Interview
1. Homework. 2. Technical Phone Screen.
This was definitely one of the worst interviews I've ever had. The homework was fine, but the technical screen was just bizarre. First, they emailed me indicating I was to interview with a frontend engineer in London (I was interviewing for a frontend position). Then, once I'm in the interview, my interviewer, an engineer in Los Angeles (not London), tells me he doesn't know frontend that well and did mainly backend and devops work. He asks me very generic and open ended questions and doesn't dig deeper into my answers. He then gives me a coding exercise that's just reversing the values in an array, which I quickly answer correctly and efficiently. He was so unfamiliar with JavaScript that it took him a good minute to understand my solution.
A day later, a rejection email arrives stating that the reason I wasn't moving forward was because my debugging skills were not strong enough. The only question that I can recall that could be have touched on this topic was one that asked "What would you do if an app was slow to load?". This is more of an optimization problem, but you do need to know how to debug the app to provide a good solution. But the question was so vague that there are a million ways to answer this and the interviewer did not at all hint that he was looking for a solution that tested my knowledge of debugging, which I could have given in depth had I known.
Finally, in the rejection email, the recruiter asks if she could share my resume with other companies looking to fill a similar role. Which, given the weird technical interview, made me think they were running a TripleByte like recruiting business on the side and my interview was just a bait and switch situation.
I honestly don't know if they were ever serious in hiring me. I just felt sad after the whole thing - not because I got rejected, but because it just seemed like such a waste of time.
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