My interview process with Beam was pretty neutral, not bad but not great. I applied via LinkedIn and was contacted about a week later by an Engineering/Hiring Manager. I had an initial call with the manager which lasted about 30 mins. He asked me about my experience. It was pretty casual and nice, no annoying "tell me about a time when..." questions. The next step was a take home coding challenge, which I much prefer over live coding challenges. The challenge was to build a backend (either in Ruby or JS) for a box shipping system with very specific prompts. I really liked the format as it was easy to follow once I got started. They said not to spend more than 6 hours on it, but I'm pretty sure I spent more time than that because they not only wanted functionality, but they wanted me to write unit tests as well!

There was an initial phone screen with a recruiter, followed by a code challenge. After some review of the code challenge, I went for an on-site interview that was about 3-4 hours. The first part was going over my coding challenge and talking about some past coding experiences. This was followed by a panel interview by other beam employees, which wasn't technical, but consisted of a lot of 'tell me about a time when...' type personality questions. Lastly, there was an interview with some manager level people, but this too seemed to be more of the personality type questions. They are definitely looking for a particular type of person, which I was not. I could sense it from the moment I arrived. The company has a well manicured culture, and while it may look somewhat diverse, it's only skin deep.