Application submitted, skill test completed.
Next step was an assignment (answer a customer service question). I submitted it and asked for their budget for the role because "top of market compensation" doesn't really mean anything when they're advertising in markets like Slovakia, India and the Philippines, and I wanted to know what I was competing for. I'm pretty sure nobody reviewed the assignment because I immediately got 3 disjointed emails in rapid succession following my submission: a request for a call, then 2 hours later a second assignment, and then 2 hours after that the dreaded (and exploitative) salary expectations question. (Still no transparency around pay.) I told them my expectations based on fair market rate and the process ended there.
Maybe if you're planning to hire pay the new hire developing economy rates, just say that so everyone else doesn't waste their time applying for this.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There was a skill testing question that measured basic logic and reading skills, then a somewhat misleading customer service question ("Quick question about vesting for you. Since no one owns stock until it’s vested, who owns the company before the one year cliff?"), and then a second assignment I didn't actually look at.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Clerky in Jan 2023
Interview
Had an interview with CTO who was really nice. He told me he would like to move on to a three hour technical pairing exercise over Zoom. Three hours is pretty long but not really a big deal! Come interview day I was told that this "pairing" exercise would actually be just me, sitting alone on a live and recorded zoom call. I was told I could ping the CTO if I needed him but, whether he meant it that or not, it came off as, "You probably shouldn't need ping me." So for the next three hours I sat on a zoom call awkwardly talking out loud to myself while trying to solve what wasn't a terribly difficult problem, but tough enough that being flustered made it all kind of difficult.
The second strike is that while that in my rejection letter—which was at least prompt and very cordial—they offered to let me speak to one of the engineers for "some thoughts, though not necessarily feedback" which was sort of confusing. I responded graciously saying I was expecting the rejection and would love to talk to one of the engineers. That was the last I hear from them.
I'm sure Clerky is a great company to work for but this interview left me feel really low in a way I don't usually do. It made all the more confusing by how nice the CTO was.
TL;DR, beware.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There was a two-part exercise. I can't remember the first one very well but it had to do with refactoring form fields, I think. The second part of an optimization question that was more difficult. It was largely an N+1 thing only the relationships were set up in a convoluted way that made it difficult to untangle. I can't remember very well, though they were fun problems to work on, you just need to be able to do them quickly.
