Mission: Making shopping a truly personal experience
In September, Bazaarvoice hit record numbers with our b:generous week! I good reminder the importance of generosity at the workplace. http://glassdoor.com/slink.htm?key=vMYc9
Bazaarvoice acquires Influenster to enhance product reviews and user-generated content solutions http://glassdoor.com/slink.htm?key=vMlRH
Bazaarvoice is a network that connects brands and retailers to the authentic voices of people where they shop.
Each month, more than 700 million people view and share authentic opinions, questions and experiences about tens of millions of products in the Bazaarvoice network.
Our technology platform amplifies these voices into the places that influence purchase decisions. Network analytics help marketers and advertisers provide more engaging experiences that drive brand awareness, consideration, sales and loyalty.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Bazaarvoice has offices in Belfast, Chicago, London, Munich, New York, Paris, Sydney, and Vilnius.
Passion
We’re fortunate to work, live, and play in some of the best cities in the world. To celebrate everything our communities give to us, we give back through personal and corporate involvement. Generosity is one of our core values, and is at the heart of what we do.
Hear more about being generous at BazaarVoice with Loran Gutt, VP of Product Startegy: BazaarVoice Blog
Below are a few pictures from our annual b: generous week in 2018 (September 24th - 28th):
When you’re working at Bazaarvoice, it shouldn’t always feel like work.
US-based employee benefits:
Benefits for all employees:
Helpful (2)
I have been working at Bazaarvoice full-time (Less than a year)
Pros
This is the first time I've worked at a company that thrives on trust. I'm really privileged to work with passionate professionals who don't rub their expertise in your face.
I'm loving being in Belfast, where the majority of product is based. Multiple teams are here, and I get to work with them. I get a great sense of product ownership here, with complete autonomy to perform at my best.
The culture is continually evolving, and we're getting more established. With a new office manager and a new CEO for 2020, we're well on our way for being innovative market leaders. And we just get to go along with the ride.
There's the perks & benefits which are awesome.
Cons
It's been 3 months so far since joining. All the negative things are being fixed, and even in a few months I'm seeing massive progress. Like getting the entire Belfast office aligned, building stronger teams and more efficient calibration. I'm genuinely excited to see progress happen. Watch this space, it's going to blossom further into a pretty epic product company.
Advice to Management
Continue to push for product-centric teams.
Application
The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bazaarvoice (Austin, TX) in March 2019.
Interview
TLDR: The coding problems consist of classical Cracking The Coding Interview stuff and no single problem was overly difficult. But I would still recommend to properly prepare since it’s a different beast to solve these problems on a whiteboard - even if they are a rather easy if you are sitting at home on your couch with your favorite IDE. Furthermore, be prepared to cover _a lot_ of topics: The interviewers (most of them are very experienced) asked me questions that covered everything from low-level data structure and implementation stuff to design, scalability, QA, DevOps, development methodologies and leadership. Last but not least: The recruiter I worked with (Michael) did an outstanding job - he was very engaged and kept me informed about every step in the process.
Step 0: A recruiter got in touch with me on LinkedIn / initial call with the recruiter
The interview process consisted of 7 steps:
Step 1: Phone Interview with the Hiring Manager
A roughly 45 minutes long phone interview with the hiring manager. This was actually a little bit tricky since I interviewed for 2 different roles at the same time. That made the conversation until the end of the interview process a little bit less straight forward compared to the case where you know exactly which role you are applying for.
Step 2: Technical phone screen
A software engineer administered a coding challenge via CodePair. It started with a fairly easy tree construction / processing exercise. The interviewer then incrementally added more requirements and asked some behavioral question in the end.
Step 3 (on-site): 1 hour whiteboard coding session
Two software engineers conducted a 1-hour whiteboard coding session that covered basic data structure stuff. While it was not too difficult, you should be confident writing compilable code on a whiteboard.
Step 4 (on-site): 1 hour lunch with the hiring manager
A (obviously) less technical session without any whiteboarding. Gave both me and the hiring manager a chance to talk in more detail about both roles. The hiring manager also asked a lot of process related questions: Which development methodology (e.g. Scrum vs Kanban) do I prefer and why? What is my take on TDD? Stuff like this.
Step 5 (on-site): 1 hour whiteboard system design session
One software engineer and a DevOps manager conducted a 1-hour whiteboard system design session. The task was to design a scalable web application. Should not be too difficult if you have done that before.
Step 6 (on-site): 1 hour DevOps / QA Q&A session
A 1 hour conversation with two DevOps / QA engineers. Boy, I don’t even recall how many topics we touched. Felt like we talked about every single topic you can discuss about in software engineering world.
Step 7 (on-site): 1 hour whiteboard coding session
Ironically, the initial task (some in-place string manipulation stuff) was the easiest problem I was given so far. But I made the mistake to define my test cases only as set of parameters (I did not write down the expected values). The result was that I had to keep track of two different things while manually debugging my code: What should the algorithm do vs. what does the algorithm do. This threw me off big time and I was not able to fully recover from my brain freeze (since at this time I did not really see the root cause). So I just struggled through it until the end.
Interview Questions
