The interview process was enjoyable, but there was a large disconnect between recruiters and engineers. The feedback received was contradictory to what happened during the interview, leaving me with more questions than answers.

TLDR for Snyk: Focus on aligning interviewers, hiring managers, and talent partners on expectations. So far, negative experiences are common among everyone I know who has interviewed here. Do not advertise a pair programming step if your engineers do not practice pair programming. It's a negative experience for everyone involved and a waste of time for both candidates and interviewers, who often seemed unenthusiastic.

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The process is simple and progressive (on paper):

• Talent partner chat
• Take-home PR review, related to dependency trees – a really good and relevant challenge.
• Review the PR with two engineers who discuss your comments and then have you implement something related to the problem, described as a pair programming interview.

My personal feedback:

"Everything went great and feedback was perfect but because I didn't include an edge case in my initial implementation in the 30 minutes it's a no." (This was a tree traversal with additional factors. We also went over time, and I had my own schedule to get back to.)

As I was programming and chatting with the interviewers, we discussed the edge case and outlined pseudo-code for its implementation.

1. A significant amount of time was spent on system design questions, which left little time for pair programming. Interviewers should improve time management and save system design questions for the dedicated system design interview.
2. The interview was described as pair programming but felt more like an exam requiring perfection. The company should choose one approach.
3. If a single edge case is the sole reason for rejection (as implied by the feedback and other reviews), finding candidates willing to join and grow will be challenging. If the goal is to find coders who can 'just do it all,' consider that software houses offer contractors who can deliver expected code, potentially using AI tools.
4. The interviewers instructed me to fix the most important issue to me in the PR, while the Talent Acquisition partner emphasized testing. The engineers, however, were not focused on testing and had a specific issue they wanted me to address. This highlights a disconnect.

The foundation for a strong interview process exists, but the engineering team is hindering it. They appear unmotivated and seem to be looking for reasons to disqualify candidates. There is a clear disconnect between engineers and talent partners.

For Snyk to effectively find the right candidates during its growth phase, internally training engineers to be better interviewers would be beneficial.

I would likely interview here again. The company has the makings of a good role at a good company, but internal attitudes and the disconnect between the process and the engineers are off-putting.

Review a PR based on dependency trees.

After your feedback, choose the most important issue and fix it.

What next steps would you take to move this into production?

What's the difference between each caching layer, and when would you use each one?