I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Quandoo (New York, NY)
Interview
Only got the chance to do the given coding task.
A word of advice, do the opposite of what is being asked.
Follow the practices for code and unit tests and add functionality intuitively.
As these are the criterion for judgement. Not what is being asked to implement or to add.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Modify some existing implementation of cuisine-customer registration and implement a new function
HR was pleasant enough, after our conversation she said that I need to write testing task and this task does not have to take more than 2 hours. I would have two more interviews if I they approved testing task... one technical and another with CEO
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. There were few acceptance criteria and I did not violate any ones.
2. I've sent task and I end up did not wait for response (it's been 4 days of a silence). Just after pushing HR in the same day I've received response.
3. in the feedback was said:
a) that I'd chosen bad desigh for scalability however without any evidence why. I know companies where suggested solution works successfully (exactly in the same situation!!!!)LOL.
b) that I did not handle concurrency - it's truth, I even mentioned this fact in the task and I'd written that it can be refined. Guys, do you think it is possible to write well defined/well-tested/thread-safe design during 2 hours? LOL
c) that using enum for some kind of entities like country.. in an app there were just 3 constant string values - is it bad candidate for Enum. I'd adhere to simple and transparent desigh without premature optimisation - becouse it a big evil )))
d) And one of my favorite formulation:"Write up would not work" - what? I've covered my code with Unit tests, and coverage was about 99%, I'd tested every single bit of code - and it will not work? LOL
Guys, read please above carefully and make your decision wisely ;)
Hello from Quandoo Tech,
We are sorry that you had a bad experience and we thank you for sharing your thoughts. We are constantly improving our recruitment process and calibrating tasks reviews, so your feedback is very valuable.
Please allow us to address 2 points:
Time - we do not set time limit. 2hrs is just an estimate of an average solution. About the task verification waiting time - please consider that we need to block senior engineers' time to review the task - sometimes it is harder to do immediately.
Details of the task - We share the review feedback so the candidate's time invested is not completely wasted even if the result is negative. We all thrive to improve in the spirit of software craftsmanship. Here is probably not the best place to address specific elements of the evaluation, but please understand a candidate's solution is pitched against a range of other solutions and the overall quality is judged.
Thanks and good luck with your future endeavours,
The Quandoo Team