I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Pandora (Oakland, CA)
Interview
I applied through an internal referral. The process took 2 months.
Of all the interviews I attended, Pandora has a perfect process. They ask questions that are relevant to the role. It started off with a discussion with the recruiter and a couple of technical phone calls before the onsite interview in Oakland. The questions tested if one has a deep understanding of iOS development and also data structures. Most of the questions asked were usual leet code questions and iOS development questions. In person interviews consisted of 6 45-minute interviews where questions varied from general problem solving to iOS development. The interviewers were pretty friendly and open minded.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
*General leetcode questions
*Unit testing in iOS
*UI development
I applied online. I interviewed at Pandora (Oakland, CA) in July 2017
Interview
The interview process is not efficient in finding talented employees, The strategy is, I ask as much as questions until you eventually fail, so basically if you slip in an answer they will totally forget about what you have answered so far and stick with what you failed to mention or answer , I passed my first interview with a lot of deep questions, by the second interview I already had two job offers from other companies in my hand , I guess I forgot to mention a feature in one the questions, then the day after I went with my other offer, and happy did not waited for their long two weeks response.
The questions are all over the place, they overlap each other yet are non conclusive, meaning if they ask you 3 hard questions that covers the memory management subject and you answer them right, later in another interview they ask you a simpler question and you forget to give correct answer you fail, doesn't matter if you previously harder questions under the same subject.
That's why I believe the strategy is I ask until you fail.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Initializing an UI element in viewDidLoad, which has not been defines as optional nor has been initialized in Init() function.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Pandora (Oakland, CA)
Interview
The first interview was a phone screen with the recruiter and I was asked some iOS related questions.
We skipped the second technical phone screening because I'm local and instead they scheduled me to come in on-site.
Two weeks later I went in for the on-site interviews with 2 engineers, one followed with the hiring manager. Both interviews were 30 minutes long, if all had gone well then the last interview would also have been 30 minutes with the hiring manager. However, since I didn't do well on the second interview, I didn't go on to the third. Instead the Hiring Manager thanked me for my time and escorted me out. He invited me to apply when I have more experience, and let me know the interviewers enjoyed talking to me.
Overall it was a positive experience. The recruiter was very helpful, friendly, and genuinely seemed to want my success. The first on site interviewer was great, he was friendly, down-to-earth, and helped me when I seemed stuck on the algorithm. The second interviewer didn't seem interested in me, glanced at his phone a couple of times, and was quick to rush out of the room. The hiring manager, however, was really friendly - as was the staff that coordinated the interviews.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of songs, write an algorithm that returns the first stale (aka repeated) song.