TellApart Software Engineer Interview Questions

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Software Engineer Interview

16 Jun 2014

Anonymous interview candidate

Declined offer

Positive experience

Average interview

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at TellApart (Burlingame, CA)

Interview

Initial communication with the recruiter was very helpful, he gave me an insight into the company with a hint of company culture, and helped set up a phone screen. The phone screen was somewhat fuzzy initially since the interviewer asked me a broad range of questions, however a portion of it was probing into the technologies I was aware of however, didn't have practical experience (I hadn't mentioned these on my resume). This was followed by a coding question. The next step was an on-site interview. The office is cool, and located in Burlingame in a quiet place. The onsite interview was split into three different sections. Also, the interview panel for each round is two people instead of one, which I think makes the interview more relaxed and more of a discussion than a grilling interview. The engineers are bright and friendly. 1. Deep dive into a technical project you've worked on recently. This is a lot of fun, and the engineers probed into different ares of the project and the design decisions, future improvements etc. This is a good way to ease into the technical question. The question was not particularly difficult but demanded specificity, good understanding of data structures and algorithms. 2. This was the round in which I was asked to reviews a snippet of code, which was sent to me the previous day. This rounds focuses on your ability to access scalable, clean code. I liked it due to its practical nature. This was followed by a design question, the difficulty of which increased fairly quickly as I was asked to scale it up to large number of users and change constraints and requirements. 3. The final interview was with Wade, the VP of Engineering and your Engineering manager. It was insightful, challenging yet fun. Fun part is, you can't really prepare for it, however it'll definitely leave you with a positive feeling about the company and its culture.

Other Software Engineer interview reviews for TellApart

Software Engineer Interview

10 Sept 2015

Anonymous interview candidate

No offer

Negative experience

Average interview

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at TellApart in Jun 2015

Interview

John, the recruiter, is a very pleasant guy, but the interviewer was not at all. The interview started 15 minutes late. Then he asked me to access any computer (this should have been communicated well in advance). He gave me a question to solve. I definitely struggled to solve the question in the first attempt. The interviewer kept himself silent for more than 5 minutes without a word. After a lot of try and error he then said "I want to be honest. You are not in the level of what we are looking for". Very rude and unprofessional. Well this behaviour is very normal from many start-ups, no surprise here. Then he continued and asked me if I want another chance and I said yes. Instead of testing me about specific thing that you know, test me about "how I think", he gave me a text searching problem, I solved it and then he abruptly said "I am almost done here, any questions?".

Interview questions [1]

Question 1

Why Tellapart?

Answer question

Software Engineer Interview

9 Jul 2014

Anonymous interview candidate

No offer

Negative experience

Application

I interviewed at TellApart

Interview

I have interviewed with about 10 companies over my employment and TellApart is by far offers the worst treatment to its candidates. This raises the question as to how they will treat you once you are employed. TellApart showed complete disrespect to my personal time as well as lack of professional attitude. First, I had to spend a significant amount of time on their pre-onsite interview homework which had to be done in Java even though I am not a Java programmer. That is passable assuming they would indeed bother to look at it but they did not. When they invited me on site, I had to take half of a day off since the interview was promised to last 3-4 hours (no lunch offered). Normally companies offer several questions to give you a thorough evaluation and many chances to show how you can handle different types of problems. They understand that interviewing is in an investment on the candidate's part and want to make sure the candidate was given a fair assessment. That is not how TellApart interviews. Initially I spent about 30 min on a technical question. I quickly came up with a passable solution and with a hint and some discussion improved it. Sure, coming up with a solution without any discussion is better, but with all of the interviews I have had a discussion was expected. I did fine on that question. Then they spent about 30 minutes asking me in detail what I was doing at my previous job. After that they walked out and came back 10 minutes later telling me that they want to be efficient with their interviewing process and walked me out. I was stunned as I did not fall on my face during the interview to get such a treatment. The question was answered. May be they did not like my experience at my previous job, but if this has such a weight on them, I should have been not invited to a phone screen or at least not on site. I have not had an interview when so much weight was put on the previous experience. All companies agree these days that it is aptitude that matters and do not spend more then 10 min on the background. TellApart spent 30 minutes on it.

Interview questions [1]

Question 1

Only 1 question was asked. Yes, TellApart thinks it is enough.

Answer question

TellApart response

11y

[sorry for lack of paragraphs, but it looks like this web form doesn't support formatting] There’s a harsh reality to interviewing with start-ups: If you don’t interview well, you run the risk of getting walked out early. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen all that often because it’s not fun for either side (for the last year, we’re talking about a < 5% occurrence rate here). I won’t deny that we have a very high bar, and there’s only so much one of our engineers can screen against on the phone before we invite someone to interview with us on-site. Sadly, sometimes people don’t interview all that well in person. And this scenario can be especially tough on someone who doesn’t even realize how poorly they might have done! To them, I’m sure we must look like the bad guys. And I’m terribly sorry about that =/ Moving forward, I’ve already taken some steps to embrace the valuable insights from this candidate’s feedback (ignoring the cathartic parts): 1) We’ve decided to switch the order of our technical interview around to discuss the take-home assignment first. This candidate was correct in feeling frustrated about putting work toward something that didn’t materialize. And we’re going to avoid that happening again in the future. BTW, I also offer people the choice of coming in for ~ 2.5 hours (for the technical phase only), so the time commitment is mitigated, on the slight chance that the interview ends up not going very well. But this candidate chose to try to get it all done at once (and ended up taking a bigger risk for it). 2) I’m also going to be much more vocal about the warning I give candidates re: the potential danger of walking them out early if things don’t go well. I glossed over that with this candidate (based on strength of resume), and it came back to haunt me. If anyone has any questions or concerns re: this situation or would like me to clarify any part of my statement, please feel free to email me to schedule a time to chat: John Delaney (johnd@tellapart.com. PS, I also offer to give people direct feedback re: their interview with us. All this person had to do was call me for that feedback. Instead he/she chose to vent on a public forum. If you choose to interview with us, you will get that same level of access and visibility re: your performance. There’s really no guesswork involved here …

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