I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Inventables (Chicago, IL) in Apr 2021
Interview
I was initially contacted by a recruiter and very excited about the prospects of this position.
The process was about 3 weeks and went like this:
- 15 min phone conversation about my history
- 1 hour phone interview - mostly non-technical
- 1 hour interview with two developers
- 30 min phone conversation with HR
- 2 Hour technical interview with two devs. (this was a rather frustrating experience. - see the interview question below)
Despite having 3 other offers, and a not so great technical interview experience, they encouraged me to continue in the process, which required:
- Submitting a formal job application which included filling out a detailed work history for my last 6 positions (this info was included on my resume)
- The last step in the process was a 2 hour non-techncial video interview about the company and my work history.
all of the questions were essentially boilerplate: strengths / weaknesses about the work history that I had submitted.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Technical Interview:
First I had to install some archaic screen sharing program, and grant it all sorts of permissions for my computer, Then they had me clone a repo (rentables). The application didn't run because the dependencies were outdated and it ran on a version of ruby that was nearing end of life. I was able to update the dependencies, and install the correct ruby version.. however, at this point, we had spent a lot of time on getting set up, and friendly questions about the weather etc.
The problems were essentially fairly trivial rails challenges. Make sure some minitest test cases pass related to date math. As presented, under pressure, and while being interrupted as I attempted to explain my reasoning, also without the ability to look up the specific query syntax etc, this proved to be a difficult and frustrating experience. Had this been a take home challenge more akin to normal working conditions, I think it would have been very easy to complete.
- tell us about your manager's strengths
- tell us about your manager's weaknesses
- tell us about what your manager would say your strengths are
- tell us about what your manager would say your weaknesses are
repeat for every job you've had in the last 10 years
