I applied online. I interviewed at Sonos (Seattle, WA) in June 2017
Interview
Applied online for software engineering position for networking team. One of the engineers reached out for a video phone interview. Discussion regarding background and position in general. After this phone interview, they wanted to setup a second video phone interview with another engineer. The second phone interview involved a very simple coding challenge using collabedit with discussion around testing etc.
The feedback was positive and they wanted to proceed with on-site interview. This is where things started to get weird.
The initial position I applied for was listed at Seattle. But I was asked to fly into Boston to get a "better interview experience". When I probed further asking why I couldn't interview at Seattle, I got to know that most of the networking team is based in Boston and a remaining engineers are spread across the other two sites (Santa Barbara and Seattle). There were no clear explanations offered about the team structure, who my hiring manager was going to be and where would he/she be located.
It appeared that Sonos believes in having a distributed team across the 3 sites who would use videoconferencing (VC) for conducting meetings. While VCs have come a long way, they are certainly no substitute for face-to-face interactions with peers, hallway conversations, soundboarding etc. There is a lot of value to these especially when it comes to solving very hard engineering problems.
Anyway, I eventually interviewed at the Seattle office. The on-site interviews started at 8:30 in the morning and ended at 4:27 pm, even though the actual end time was supposed to be 4pm. The interviews were spread across multiple 1-1 rounds with some being over VC with engineers from the other two offices (Boston, Santa Barbara) and some being in person with engineers at Seattle. Coding was over whiteboard + coderpad (laptop with screen shared)
One common theme during the interviews was that the interviewers had surprisingly different answers to one common question "In the WiFi networking stack, is the team more focused on working on the host/device driver portion OR more into the low-level WiFi firmware (including MAC and PHY)? ". Some of them claimed that the team worked on everything on the stack, while some claimed that the team only worked on the OS(Linux)/device driver portion and upper layers (application, userspace). This misalignment was a huge red flag. If the team was misaligned in answering such a simple question, how can they expect to do quality work when sitting across three remote sites?
The interview questions were not that hard, but the sheer length of the interview process drained me towards the last two rounds. They could have easily conducted the interviews in a 2-1 fashion and get done with the whole thing in under 5 hours. I am not sure how much you are going to learn about the candidate after he is mentally exhausted towards the end of the day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1) Data structures and algorithms:
2) Questions about WiFi security (WPA2), message exchanges
3) Networking-related questions: TCP, UDP, OSI
4) Misc questions: random numbers, bash scripting, python scripting,
some stupid question about picking balls from basket in my final round which was annoying because the interviewer was not ready to clearly specify what the question was...
I applied online. I interviewed at Sonos (Boston, MA) in Jan 2025
Interview
recruiter call, easy technical interview, then three in depth interviews with team members. They were all very nice except for the boss, who didn't seem to take my experience seriously from the start. Got rejected in the very last round. could be related to their recent layoffs
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a project which you are least proud of
I applied for a React engineer role. During my interview with the hiring manager, I was told that the next step was going to be a coding challenge with another engineer and they will be testing me in React and hacking a project together.
During the coding portion, I wasn't tested in React but instead a LC medium problem. Testing a front-end engineer with LC problems is a complete waste of time in my opinion. I want to add that the interviewer did not seem excited as he didn't properly introduce himself or properly conclude the interview. He just abruptly said, "ok, talk to you later" and ended the call.
Culture here doesn't seem all that great judging by the interview.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Sonos in Mar 2022
Interview
Had a pretty decent experience with the on-site and the engineering team, but a bad experience with the recruiter - ultimately ghosted. It seems that the way Sonos interviews may vary from team to team - I interviewed for a *frontend* team.
Steps:
- Initial call with recruiter. The recruiter was late, and his answers were vague and unhelpful (maybe because he’d only been there for a couple months), and did not make me excited about joining Sonos. He was also confused by some info clearly listed on my resume, and then he gave me questionable advice on it. (I’ve gotten many interviews with other companies, so I don’t think it was a problem.)
- Tech screen - a simple assessment in javascript; the engineer was polite and kind, seemed personable.
- A prep call with the recruiter. He completely forgot about the call, and I had to email him later. When I did get a hold of him, he was not very helpful.
- On-site (split across two days, interviewing with members on the team):
- React exercise - implement a feature in an existing component
- Debugging exercise - fixing js code in browser environment
- Programming exercise (any language, not frontend specific)
- Design / system debugging - troubleshooting an issue in a system (based on the team’s actual architecture)
- Behavioral - 30m chat with manager (a series of quick “tell me about a time” questions)
I liked the team I met with - they all seemed engaged and enthusiastic about the new product they were working on. I thought they had a lengthy but reasonable and creative interview process that tested many different aspects of coding. One of my interviewers remarked that it was unfortunate that all my interview panel only consisted of white males.
Unfortunately, I never heard back from them. The very lengthy and unprofessional experience left with me with a sour taste, which was disappointing because I liked Sonos as a company. The experience with the team was pretty good though, so maybe the engineering culture is still nice to be part of…