American Express attended graduation hiring fairs.

They interviewed approximately 60 students on campus and moved about 10 of them forward for a coding assessment. This occurred in the first week of December 2018.

The coding assessment was scheduled for early January 2019, as all of their engineers were taking paid time off at the end of the year.

I am including the assessment in the interview section below.

The actual initial interview was very awkward, with most of the engineers being rather new and unsure of how to conduct an interview.

Results and feedback took approximately 2.5 weeks to receive.

Feedback suggesting to learn more of the languages tested on was unhelpful and showcased a lack of consistency in their entire interview process. There was little in testing language competency, rather a large test in your willingness and/or capability to devote 20, 30, 40+ hours on a project for free when the company has made no investment in you in return. Most candidates who did receive feedback were told the CSS and design was not up to par, so this seems to be what they are looking for most.

-1/10, would not recommend.

The coding assessment required you to build a simple web application. This application should allow the user to:

• Search for a book.
• Fetch and display a list of results from the Open Library API.
• Sort and filter results.
• Click on a result to view additional details, including at least cover art and a description.

They emphasized that if you don't finish within the time allotted, that's okay. This may be because they provided about a week for the project, which could have easily taken up dozens and dozens of hours. Not all candidates had schedules allowing for such free commitment.