The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Xinova (Seattle, WA)
Interview
It's Seattle. There are dozens of companies that pay more and have a higher bar so I recommend doing the whole Leetcode grind, buying CTCI, and thanking me later for saving you time and making you money. Feel free to use them for interview practice but it's not very transferrable to the other companies in the area.
PROS
1. Generally nice people
2. Chill little brownstone office.
CONS
1. Recruiter reached out to me for a front-end position. I was upfront and said I only had experience with modern frameworks (React, Angular, Bootstrap, etc.). No more, no less, and definitely no lies from myself. Phone screen was too lax and didn't catch that despite me re-iterating this to an engineer; and once I got to the onsite they asked me very specific HTML/CSS questions that I had 0 knowledge about (and never claimed to have knowledgea bout). A whole day of PTO that I'll never get back because Xinova was literally the only company in Seattle that couldn't do a proper phone screen. Do your due diligence and follow your spidey-sense (or Peter tingle, if you will) here if things seem too lax.
2. I have a very simple bar when interviewing: "Do I want to spend 8 hours a day with these people?" The answer was simply no. Check it out yourself but each and every engineer had the personality of an asocial 20-something Facebook-hoodie hacker in a grown man's body. I don't mean to be ad hominem, but this isn't an environment to collaborate with.
3. Interviewers were telling me anecdotes about how unsafe the area was and sort of is. Ah yes, I love hearing about how I might get assaulted as part of my commute!
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Xinova (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2018
Interview
The interview process was very positive. After a recruiter call and a phone call with the VP of Engineering, I was brought in for an interview loop. It’s set up as behavioral fit, technical interview, and then hands-on pair programming loop. After each round, the interviewers go away to pow wow and determine if they want to continue to the next round. The technical interview was very doable with no crazy algorithms on the white board, and the pair programming exercise was actually fun, building an app with two other engineers.
Xinova has been one of my favorite interview experiences. Evan was very engaged in the interview process and worked around my ridiculous schedule at every turn. I got responses to all my inquiries same day, had great flexibility with regards to interview date/time and flight/hotel, and Evan went as far as to recommend some awesome restaurants in the area!
I had a coding session with Paul prior to the in-person interview which was fairly easy and he gave me a great overview of exactly what Xinova does.
Next up was the in person interview where the questions were much more open ended and challenging. You get a great chance to meet leaders throughout the organization and they all left me with a lot of confidence in the business & the open-mindedness of the company's culture.
I won't go into specific technical questions, but I found them to be quite unique and fair. Overall, would have been great if we could have converged on the final terms. Regardless, it was a pleasure meeting the team over at Xinova and wish them nothing but the best of luck!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
standard coding questions, white-boarding design session, implementing a solution in real-time.