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      Backend Engineer Interview

      21 Sept 2024
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience

      Other Backend Engineer interview reviews for Better Stack

      Backend Engineer Interview

      16 Mar 2025
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Better Stack in Mar 2025

      Interview

      It was my first interview process in 7 years and I don't have too much to compare with but generally I left frustrated with the process and feel like the interviewing is completely screwed up. Now reading the other reviews here on Glassdoor I can see some confirmation of this. The interview consist of the following steps: 1. So called async interview, which is basically a 30 minutes assignment you have to work on with screen recording on (Loom). You can find the question on other reviews, it's about Excel rows. 2. Then there's HR screening, nothing special there, I can confirm other reviews that this was nice and friendly 3. Then there's first technical interview with questions with a company engineer 4. Then there's a home takeaway assignment (takes 2-4 hours). The task is to style a simple one-page webapp with Bootstrap and add a few little features to it. The app is in PHP and uses MySQL for the database. The idea of the app is that some sort of user/contact list -- adding users phone numbers and locations to the list. Also you'll need to deploy the app somewhere on the internet. 5. Then there's 2 more technical and one non-technical interviews (final) with the company C level So the general process took me about a few weeks mostly waiting for bookings of the interview slots. I think the interview design is quite screwed up. I wasted about 4 hours on take home assignment. They pay for it which is at least a bit nice but still feels like disrespect. I waited for weeks just to go through 10 minutes of questions with the CEO and after 3 questions I was rejected. I don't get why they couldn't just group all technical questions in one day and wasting more of your time. If they didn't like the level of my drill of the postgresql reference documentation they could have just done it in one day, not having me to dedicate my weekend off hours to assignments and waiting a week for the next step. Now I failed to answer the CEO's technical questions and was rejected for it. These were some questions about tools and approaches (I'll attach those here). Those were just 3 questions. For me those weren't representing anything possibly important in a software engineer's jobs. The CEO said that me not knowing answers means I'll have to learn too much and thus will take too much time to get me to bring value to the team (paraphrasing, don't remember the exact wording). However the questions were about the concepts and tools which each can be explained just under a minute and can be easily looked up. So the just made the judgement of my knowledge by a very limited set of questions and also made assumptions about my learning speed and abilities having none evidence to judge it. The whole interview process didn't contain anything which assesses what is important in the engineering job, which is problem solving skills, technical and engineering intuition, team work and communication, etc. I have a feeling that their interview is testing the skill of interview passing rather than real skills of a real-world engineer. I'd expect to be judged by how I can design technical solutions, work in collaboration with collegues, track down bugs, rather than on whether I know by heart the technical reference which can in fact be looked up under 1 minute on the internet. This is a small company with just about 10 engineers on board as of the time. Not sure how many were hired through that interview process specifically. Still does not seem to be statistically enough to draw the lines between the process and the efficiency of the new hires. Probably the process is just raw and poorly designed just because the company is relatively young and the management is not too seasoned. It's a shame because the product they are building is quite exciting and there's not that many exciting companies who hire in Europe especially with remote work options. But also makes me questioning the reasonability and judgemnt of the C level of company. They've been doing fine in terms of business so far but it could point to potential issues which are not visible from the outside. The management has engineering background so they might be just not very good with people and HR there in general. So I'm generally quite frustrated with the process but at least I've learned a bunch of new things during the interview and got some dust off my inteviewing skills.

      Interview questions [10]

      Question 1

      In Postgresql what is the difference between EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE?
      Answer question

      Question 2

      There's an evil website evil.com which renders one's facebook page in a hidden iframe that follows the mouse of the site visitor and every time the visitor clicks the mouse there's a like button on the facebook page that gets clicked. How does facebook prevent this from happening?
      Answer question

      Question 3

      There's a 100000 lines old PHP web application with a lot of vulnerabilities. You need to deploy that application. How could you protect users from the vulnerabilities?
      Answer question

      Question 4

      What does VACUUM does in Postgresql and what is a difference between VACUUM and VACUUM FULL?
      Answer question

      Question 5

      You are on Amazon reviews form and you realize you can inject random JS in the comment and it'll get executed for everyone who opens the web page. What harm you can do this way?
      Answer question

      Question 6

      Here's the SQL that is run on the form submission. What parameters you need to pass to being able to log in. The SQL is something like: SELECT * from users where username = '${username}' and password = '${password}'
      Answer question

      Question 7

      There's an image that you need to serve in a few different resolutions.
      Answer question

      Question 8

      Do you know what importmap is?
      Answer question

      Question 9

      You're building a page that is plotting data. Once the page is loaded you load a JS library that gets your data. While this is happening your page freezes and not reacting to user input. Why is that and what can be done?
      Answer question

      Question 10

      Imagine you are logged into a bank account, and there's a form on a different website asks you to transfer money. How do you protect from that?
      Answer question
      7
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Better Stack

      Interview

      First interview was with HR, which was okay, the recruiter is quite energetic. Followed by a take home assignment in a terrible web IDE. Next, a fast paced trivia style technical interview

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Explain the difference between VACUUM and VACUUM FULL in PostgreSQL
      Answer question
      3