It all started when someone reached out to me on Hired.com to schedule a screening call. The person didn't call at the agreed-upon time and gave a lame excuse, requesting to reschedule. I agreed, but it already set things off on a bad note for me.

1. Screening Call: This is your normal tech screening call, where they try to sell you the company, see if your compensation expectations are realistic, and assess if you roughly have the right skills.

2. Take-Home Test (3 hours timed): Honestly, this was one of the more enjoyable take-home tests I’ve done. They have an API endpoint you need to hit to pull back some data. You then perform some calculations on it and send it back through a POST call. My only gripe is with their POST endpoint; when sending the data back, it could provide a more descriptive error message. I burned a lot of time thinking it was telling me I wasn’t sending JSON when I knew I was.

   Tip for stage 2: Get your environment set up before you even start, to the point where you have a piece of code ready to execute a GET call. This way, you can just switch out the URL when it’s go time.

3. Virtual On-site: Two system design portions, one coding, and one manager interview.

One system design was on designing TinyURL, which is basically exactly how it sounds. This might be the only interview where I received a passing mark.

The other system design was for a weather widget. This one I believe was the primary nail in my coffin. Firstly, the interviewer was in the office at a company that allows people to work from home; something isn’t right about that. Secondly, this interviewer kept changing requirements on me, so I had to adapt my design. What was particularly annoying was in the feedback afterward, it was noted my design didn’t match my original design – really?

Also, this interviewer seemed to have dinged me on a bunch of small things. For instance, at the time, I couldn’t remember that you could do a HEAD request. They marked me down for that, but come on, man, that’s like a 3-second lesson to tell a developer you can do a HEAD call.

The coding interview involved trolling through a string to find the substring that occurs the most. I actually did this one super quickly, finishing in about 15 minutes. I don’t know if other developers do it that fast or not. They asked various questions afterward, presumably to attempt to fill the time, such as stuff about efficiency and Big O notation. Later in my feedback, it was mentioned that the interviewer tried to guide me towards some performance improvements. Maybe I’m just slow, but I don’t recall any guiding or them saying I needed to improve the performance of my code.

The final manager interview involved general questions about my experience and things I worked on. Even this interviewer dinged me on something. But perhaps what they dinged me on, I didn’t explain well enough.

Anyway, the standard 1.5 weeks passed for a rejection, along with the typical fluff rejection where they say they loved speaking with me and would look for more roles for me, or some nonsense like that. Personally, I find that sort of fluff insulting.

Most of the things I was rejected on, I feel, were small matters. In this industry, it seems like you have to score 100/100 on these interviews to get an offer. This company appears to be no exception.

The Take-Home Tech Screen

Build a weather widget on a page. It is powered by an API that supplies an XML file of weather data. Bear in mind this developer is going to start asking for historical data and what happens if the API doesn't break.

Given a string and an integer, get the count of the substring with the greatest number of occurrences.