I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Ambyint in Oct 2018
Interview
The first stages of the interview were pretty typical. I got linked via a 3rd-party recruiter, there was a general screening with one of the engineering directors, a coding project to evaluate technical skills, and then a roundtable interview with 3-4 engineers that rotated between technical questions, riddles, and more general social science questions. The roundtable was mostly fine, but it felt really inconsistent and more like a game than a naturally flowing conversation.
I had a final follow-up interview with a couple of the engineers that was prefaced as not typical, but they wanted to evaluate further for culture fit. They proceeded to describe wanting to be able to laugh and joke with one another, offering an anecdote of a previous company gathering that included a sort of comedic roasting of employees. I was then asked how I would respond if an employee casually made a phallic joke, implying that employees needed to be easygoing. I was floored that this was an actual question being asked in an interview and that it was a sign that there was an engineering culture lacking any type of diversity (everyone I talked to in the interview process was a white male). I lightly pushed back on this this as being inappropriate and awkwardly made my way through the rest of what felt like a conversation evaluating me for friendship and not as a potential coworker.
Needless to say, I wasn't offered the job, being told it "wasn't a good fit," which was accurate after that conclusion. This was in October 2018. I would hope that the culture has changed, but I recently checked, and a few of the people that interviewed me are still there in positions of leadership, so I'm skeptical of any drastic change.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Build a full stack prototype with a Node back-end and React front-end with some provided sample data (geolocation data to show on a map).