I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at The Home Depot (Smyrna, GA) in July 2017
Interview
Had a paired programming session for a couple of hours where we resolved a bug. Then had a face to face interview. The interview just consisted of fundamental programming knowledge questions regarding OOP.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at The Home Depot (Austin, TX) in Mar 2018
Interview
This was the biggest WASTE of my time I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing in the professional workplace. I was contacted by a contractor (Visionaire Partners) and invited for a Skype technical interview with Home Depot. I accepted and did well on the call. I was then invited for a second onsite technical interview. The second interview went PERFECTLY. My interviewers were friendly and helpful while still able to challenge and gauge my skillset. I knew I would be offered the job because the interview could not have gone any more perfectly. A couple days later I was offered the job and happily accepted. I began my relocation from my hometown of El Paso, TX to the office in Austin, TX to pursue this new job opportunity. I passed the drug screening and background check and was ready to begin working when I received a call saying my laptop had not been shipped yet so they wanted to push out my start date two more weeks. Finally after completely RELOCATING for this job, I received another call telling me the following:
"This has never happened before but the team you interviewed for are not able to take you. The best we can do is have you come in for another technical interview with another team and if you do well you will start immediately the next Monday."
Obviously I was furious but I accepted this "second chance" at landing a job with this flaky company. So I come in and interviewed AGAIN but this time my interviewers were awkward, quiet and unaware of my frustrating situation. The style of questions I was asked were completely different from the first interview. The interviewer would even laugh at some of my answers rather than offering any kind of guidance in understanding the problem. He would also say one thing then change it halfway through my answer. An example of this was when I asked if pseudo code would be fine in my answer to which he replied "Yes." Literally not even 30 seconds later as I was writing my answer he interrupts me and says "Let's use REAL code. You can't use pseudo code." Then a couple minutes later he says "If you're faster with pseudo code then just use it." He was pushy, rude and uninterested. Nothing like the positive experience I had with my first interviewers.
FINALLY, I get feedback from the contractor and she tells me:
"Home Depot said the interview went well but at this time they just can't hire a junior developer for that team. We can try and have them ask another team if they'll take you."
Needless to say I'm DONE with Home Depot. I wasted at least a month and a half waiting and RELOCATING, yes MOVING for this job I was offered only for them to take back their offer two days before I was going to start. I've never even heard of such an unprofessional hiring process. And yes I could wait and see if they'd find me a third interview but what's the point? Why be interviewed for a THIRD imaginary position and wast my time even further? This company should be ASHAMED for how they treat people.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tested knowledge on basic OOP principles, hash table usage, writing classes and function signatures and some basic mathematical questions. Example question: Write a function that takes two strings and returns a boolean indicating if they are permutations or not