The recruitment process begins with an email from the recruiter containing a Codility test link.

Upon completing the test, you'll have a brief call to discuss your experience and expected salary.

Two Zoom calls will be scheduled, ideally on different days to accommodate both your and the interviewer's availability. These will be technical interviews, with one day dedicated to backend and another to frontend.

Backend Interview

This interview was conducted by a Russian gentleman working at Grab Singapore. It was one of the best interviews I've ever had; he was incredibly cool. Even though my background is more in frontend, the way he conducted the entire interview was remarkable. He guided me and provided clear explanations for the coding questions. He began by asking about my backend experience and the stacks I've used, and also shared his own experiences. Finally, he presented two coding questions via CodePile and asked me to share my screen. Everything went well. When I became nervous, he calmly made the interview as cool and fun as possible.

Frontend Interview

This was one of the worst interviews I've attended so far. Despite frontend being my strength, I couldn't perform well. I was interviewed by a woman from Singapore. For reasons I'm unsure of, she did not open her camera, and she muted her audio whenever I spoke. Her voice was too soft, and she wasn't really responding to me, which made me feel awkward and as if I were talking to myself. She only asked questions, which were more theoretical, making me more nervous and feeling like I was taking an exam. Every time I asked a question or tried to confirm something, she wouldn't respond. She would ask me to explain something, and once I finished, she would ask me to state it in one sentence so she could type my response. I found the way the interview was conducted to be awkward and harsh. Dear Grab, please train and teach your engineers who interview candidates some basic manners on how to handle people from various ethnic backgrounds. The backend interviewers, in particular, did a very good job.

After the frontend interview, there was no response or message from Grab. I emailed the recruiter twice, but I haven't received a proper reply.

Codility:

Q1 - DOM Manipulation (getElementById type question) Q2 - Finding the interesting point in a given timestamp of HH:MM. The task is to find an interesting point (if the time can be represented using two or fewer distinct digits). Q3 - Traversal question starting with a scenario like: "Alice and Bob work in a beautiful orchard. There are N apple trees in the orchard..."

Backend Zoom Interview Questions:

Q1 - Given an array arr of unique nonnegative integers, implement a function getDifferentNumber that finds the smallest nonnegative integer that is NOT in the array. Q2 - You are given an array of characters arr that consists of sequences of characters separated by space characters. Each space-delimited sequence of characters defines a word. Implement a function reverseWords that reverses the order of the words in the array in the most efficient manner.

Frontend Zoom Interview:

She asked too many unrelated questions, even some backend interview questions (not sure why).

• How does a URL work?
• What is an idempotent?
• What is Server-Side Rendering?
• Pros and cons of React?
• What is MVC?
• How does a backend controller work?
• Explain the backend technologies you worked with.
• What is REST?
• What controller method would be used for a query (GET)?
• What does the POST method do (create an item)?
• What controller method would be used to update (PUT)?

Then she gave 2 coding questions:

Q1 - She showed JavaScript code with a for loop and setTimeout logging inside. She asked what the output would be. I explained the output would be 3, 3, 3, caused by closures. She asked me to explain what a closure is. I explained, and then she asked me to explain it in one sentence. As I tried to, she typed her response. She then asked how to make the code output 0, 1, 2. I suggested changing the for loop var to let, which produced the desired output. She was not aware of this solution. She then asked for another way to achieve the same result, which I didn't know. However, I explained why it was happening due to closure and scope, mentioning that let uses block scope while var uses function scope. There was no proper response, and she moved to the next question.

Q2 - She provided a class with constructors and asked me to create a notifier class. This class should trigger notifications for users at any time and allow notifications to be turned on and off.