Candidatei-me online. O processo levou 4 semanas. Fui entrevistado pela Intrepid Pursuits (Boston, MA) em mar. de 2018
Entrevista
First there was an introduction phone call that was just a get to know you. Nothing out of the ordinary on this stage.
Next there was a code-share phone call with a dev who had some code challenges. You had to solve them within 30 minutes or you failed.
Lastly they flew me out for an in person interview with 3 developers. Each interview was 1-on-1 in a small room and lasted around 45 minutes.
The first developer asked me to go over one of my projects and explain how it worked while she asked general probing questions to make sure I wasn't just BSing. Then she presented an idea for an app and had me explain how I might structure the components and why.
The second developer presented a fairly convoluted database modeling exercise that he himself had a hard time explaining. This explaining ate up a lot of the allotted time. I get what he was trying to do here, but he just wasn't very good explaining what the app was supposed to do.
The last developer had me whiteboard a couple coding challenges that weren't all that difficult. They are outlined in the questions section of this review.
Overall it was kind of a negative experience as they told me the next week that I was perfect on every aspect except database modeling so they were going to pass for now, but that maybe I could come back for the next round. You would think perfection in 9/10 aspects would be good enough for an apprenticeship.
Modeling advanced databases with a lot of connections isn't something one often does until they are working in the field, so of course I didn't have experience with this. It also didn't help the developer himself could hardly explain what the app was supposed to do for the user.
They appear to be looking for developers that are above a Jr. Developer experience level already that they can pay around ~$17 an hour for 3 months to help work on their production projects. That's how it came off to me anyway. On a positive note they paid for the flight, hotel stay, ubers and meals for the last stage which was appreciated. In the end I felt like 4 weeks of my life had been wasted after the whole process. For whatever reason 1-2 weeks are seemingly required between each phase.
I was able to land a Jr. Developer position at a different company no problem after my experience here, so in my opinion they are expecting too much for an apprentice position with 3 months of low pay and no guarantee of employment after the apprenticeship.
Perguntas de entrevista [6]
Pergunta 1
**Code-Share Phone Call**
Write a function that takes in a radius and returns the area of a circle.
**On-Site Dev 1**
Walk me through one of your projects. General probing code questions to see if I understand concepts. Created a mock React app and had me explain how I would structure the components.
**On-Site Dev 2**
Had a high level idea for an app with what it needs to do. Wanted me to design a database structure for how the different part of the collection would link up. He did not explain this app very well, and this is why I failed the interview because most of the time was taken up with him trying to explain what he even wanted the app to do.
**On-Site Dev 3**
Two Whiteboard Questions:
1. He gave me a JSON response, which has one property users that was an array of users, each user having an id username etc etc. I had to write a function that would take in that json response, and then return an object where for each user in that array, there was a property on the object where the user id was the property name, and the full user object was the value, including the id. Ex {1: {userId: 1, userName: pete} }
2. He instantiated a class that had not been created passing a string into the constructor. Then he ran a few methods on that class; add, remove, and print. Basically adding items to a cart, removing one, printing the items in the cart. My job was to write the class that could accommodate the methods he created as well as a constructor that could take in a string to add an item to the cart.
Candidatei-me online. O processo levou 2 semanas. Fui entrevistado pela Intrepid Pursuits (Boston, MA) em mar. de 2019
Entrevista
An initial phone screening, followed by a technical screening, followed by flying me to their Boston Headquarters for a three-hour interview. There were whiteboarding challenges, questions about my general development experience, and questions about Entity Relationships.
Perguntas de entrevista [1]
Pergunta 1
Create a function that analyzes an array of stock prices over time and returns the maximum possible profit when buying and subsequently selling.
I got through the first step where I was asked mostly about my background. I also was asked about my knowledge of the company and given a thorough explanation about how the apprenticeship works.
I want to start with saying, that because Intrepid is part of Accenture they have a lot of funds to go though many applicants a fly people out. Therefore, don't get your hopes up, you're not done until you get the offer.
Recruiting Process breakdown:
A. 30 min phone screen for cultural fit with recruiter
B. 30 min phone screen with engineer (white-boarding)
C. on-site 1:1 ( culture fit and casual tech talk)
D. on-site 1:1 (white-boarding)
E. on-site 1:1 (relational database question - quite confusing for some - get to know Entity Relation Diagrams with Lucid Charts)
I have mixed feeling about my experience. On the one hand I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to recruit with them, because it was an excellent learning experience, since I'm at the beginning of my career. However, there is a part of me that feels like they are privileged to recruit top talent, while not putting much effort into it (maybe that's how thing are nowadays).
You're never in direct contact with the engineers, you're only e-mailing a bunch of recruiters. It feels like you're just a "ticket" to resolve in their corporate hr system.
The engineers recruiting you at times seem very inexperienced, so why would they be able to spot talent, if they're just following a script.
The reason why it felt like that, was when I arrived to their headquarters, the person I was supposed to meet was not there... I never met them. And the person that swooped in was the same person that did the technical interview over the phone. She said, "You're not supposed to have the same person interview you twice.... meh... I guess we can start with the database portion, since person A is not here..." that really threw me off guard... and when I finished the interview process, I saw an e-mail that was sent to me about some prep work, a day too late. They forgot (???). I must say that I could have lost this one to someone's bad mood that day.
Be wary of someone's unprofessionalism my fellow code babies.
