I recently completed a full interview sequence at Ford Motor Company and thought it might be helpful to recap the experience.

I am not 100% certain how things work for regular Ford candidates, but I get the impression that for most candidates, the process is simply a phone interview to start with and then the one panel interview done on-site. This is a pleasant, very dramatic contrast from the intensive, multi-round, multiple-half/full-day interviewing scenarios most software engineering candidates will get at any other company.

In my particular case, I did three rounds of interviewing (one phone, two on-site) because the group I was interviewing with was a start-up company that Ford acquired. The third round was the FMC standard interview, which I’ll be recapping here.

For the on-site interview, Ford has set up a cavernous, cinder-block-walled “talent center” for interviewing within a strip-mall-like office complex about 1-2 miles from the “Glass House” (the informal name for their glass-clad, 1960’s-style World Headquarters).

Pay attention to the sentence in the interview arrangements e-mail that says “show up early!” This is so they can show you 15-20 minutes of videos (a canned “Welcome to Ford!” video, plus a “Pure Michigan” video which tries to promote why Michigan is actually a really good place to live).

Then comes the panel interview. In my case, it was three people: the CEO of the startup that Ford acquired (Livio Radio, to be specific), plus a Ford chief electrical product analyst and a feature owner (project/product manager?). Each of them took turns reading off prepared (standard) questions from sheets of papers.

Many of the questions were standard interviewing questions (“what are the accomplishments you’re most proud of?”), and there were a few broad technical questions in there such as “how would you design an API to interface with a deck of cards?” or “For a given middle school, describe how many buses would be needed to move students in and out most efficiently?”

All in all, nothing unexpected for anyone with a CS degree, and I was very thankful to be able to engage with and ask the panel my own questions between theirs.

After the panel interview is concluded and handshakes are done, you’ll be offered the opportunity to take a guided tour. This will either be a drive around the many various buildings that Ford uses in the Dearborn area or a tour of the famous Rouge manufacturing complex (which is where raw elements/materials go in on one end, and completely manufactured cars come out the other).

I think there’s a lunch included as well, but since I was a local candidate, I took off before the tour and didn’t get to find out what kind of sandwiches they distribute in the Talent Center candidate lunchroom.

And as a nice “thank you” gesture, the Ford talent center personnel even provide candidates with a parting gift: a little insulated cooler bag filled with a few different pieces of Ford schwag (a thermos, a can opener, a flashlight which I regret immediately losing).

Hopefully, my experience with the Ford interview process will help you to prepare to pass your interviewing day. If you find any of the information in this review helpful, please let me know by voting "Yes" on the "Helpful?" question below (this helps to motivate me to be as detailed as possible).

Given a string that has various brackets (e.g. {, (, [, }, ), ]) built into it, how would one tell that the string has a balanced number of brackets and in order?