The best interview experience I had. The interviews were organized and structured well. People were very nice and helpful, and they wanted you to succeed. Questions asked in the onsite were fair and well thought out, although I’d say they were harder than the questions I got during a Google interview. Here’s the whole experience from beginning to end:

A sourcer reached out to me in August, and I initially declined. But in October, I reached out to the sourcer and then got on a phone call with a recruiter. After that phone call, I was scheduled to have a 30-minute phone call with an engineer. In this phone call, there were no programming or CS questions, but it was a time for the engineer to get to know me and for me to get to know Thumbtack's tech stack and additional information about the company from an engineer's point of view. After that call, I was scheduled for an hour-long technical phone interview. This interview involved me answering some coding questions on HackerRank's CodePair. I can't remember the specifics, but it was one or two pretty standard coding questions. After this came the onsite interview. The interview started at 11:45 AM and ended at 5:45 PM and included a one-hour lunch with an engineer. The process in order:

1. Lunch with engineer: Food was so good. We didn’t talk much about tech stuff but more about what life is like at Thumbtack. I was told this lunch interview wasn’t being graded or anything.

2. 1-on-1 Coding interview: The coding interviews at Thumbtack are done on a laptop, also in HackerRank’s CodePair, so no writing code on a whiteboard, which I was pretty happy about (but there are whiteboards in the room in case you need to draw something out). This interviewer in particular was very enthusiastic and made me feel comfortable. But the question I got was pretty hard. I asked for hints, and the interviewer was very nice and helpful. I couldn’t finish in time, but I explained my thought process and my proposed solution, and the interviewer seemed satisfied. My interviewer told me this was a question not many people finished, so I felt a little bit relieved even though I didn't finish.

3. 1-on-1 Coding interview: Standard coding problem, not too hard.

4. 1-on-1 Coding interview: Standard coding problem, not too hard.

5. Pairing session w/two other engineers: In this interview, I was given a laptop with Thumbtack’s actual iOS codebase. I was given a small task as if it were something I would actually do at work. I got to use Google, and I asked the interviewers a good amount of questions in the process.

After about a week, I got the results and was given the offer! The whole process from me reaching out to the sourcer up to getting the offer took about a month. A tip for the technical interviews: think out loud. Explain your thought process even if you’re not sure or are stuck; that way, the interviewer knows how to help you.

General software development + algorithm questions. Study your algorithms and pull problems on HackerRank, LeetCode, etc., and you should be good.