30-min initial call with internal recruiter

Live coding session (1 hour)

After passing the coding session, I was offered an on-site technical challenge, whiteboarding session, and round-robin interviews. I was also given the option to complete the challenge at home first. I selected the latter and chose the front-end option. One question was to implement toaster notifications, and the second was to complete a game (both questions provided starter code with compiling/live reload).

After submitting the challenge, I was told I would not be moving forward. The recruiter said the toaster app looked good, but my game was not playable. I took a quick look at the game and noticed an error with the key-binding behavior. In about 5 minutes, I sent her the updated code and received this reply:

"Just spoke to the engineer who reviewed your challenge. He said that this does indeed address his concerns and if this is what you shipped initially, then you'd be moving forward to the on-site interview. Unfortunately, our answer remains the same.

That being said, I think it'd be great if we could stay in touch for future opportunities!"

My advice is to consider doing the challenge on-site. The recruiter indicated that on-site, you would have access to an engineer. In my case, I could have received appropriate feedback and adjusted the game code before shipment.

My advice to Instacart would be to standardize the interview process.

Live coding - implement a key/value class with some custom functionality.