Process
A nice, smooth, and well-supported process.
Initial contact was from a recruiter. This was followed by a brief 20-minute phone screen with no technical questions, focusing only on career-related matters. They then supported travel and accommodation for the interview.
The interview day was really enjoyable for me. All the interviewers were friendly. There were some challenging questions, but they were very open to discussing the problems and working through solutions, without giving away any answers.
I found it to be a positive experience. My tip would be to be prepared in terms of general algorithmic questions and specific questions to your area of expertise (i.e., platforms). Be relaxed and open to feedback, and generally positive, outgoing, and sociable.
Questions
Exhaustive path search in a grid.
Given a grid of letters and a starting position, you can move up, down, left, and right. You cannot cross the same cell more than once. Find all possible paths that lead to a word and return the possible words.
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 5 interview experiences for the Groupon Software Engineer role in Australia.
Success Rate
Groupon's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in Australia is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Groupon's Software Engineer interview process in Australia.
Groupon Work Experiences
- 4.0Good place to learnSoftware Engineer • Former EmployeeJanuary 3, 2023Pros: Good place to grow. Good WLB. Good amount of ownership. Great tech.Cons: Layoffs and reorgs are a concern.
- 1.0Incompetent Management, Toxic CultureSoftware Engineer • Former EmployeeChicago, Illinois, United StatesApril 19, 2017Pros: Standard tech company benefits like free soda and funky furniture.Cons: My manager was completely incompetent. Luckily, he has since left the company. Some of the people I worked with here were very conniving and threw their teams under the bus in order to score a few points from management. Groupon tried to bill itself as "the next Amazon," but did not have the engineering talent or management structure to support that claim. Instead, you got a lot of horrible leaders who were only in their position because they happened to be there when Groupon was growing. As a result, GRPN (at least in engineering) was a revolving door. I saw several people start with enthusiasm, only to leave after a month. Now that the company is older and clearly is not the next Amazon, you would expect that they would change their management style and try to retain engineers, but from what I have heard, they are actually doubling down on the aggressive "bro" culture and shipping jobs to India or Ireland.
- 4.0A dynamic company with many moving partsSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeePalo Alto, California, United StatesNovember 28, 2014Pros: Good working environment, training budget, meals, good benefits & career progression. Relaxed dress code. People are quite helpful.Cons: Managers seem to be under a lot of pressure, leading to bad requirements, lots of back and forth, and bug reports. There's a lack of focus on tooling, which leads to slower iterative cycles.
Groupon Interview Questions
