Frontend Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California
Process
I had an HR call followed by a technical interview with a Senior Engineer. I passed the HR call, and the hiring manager indicated my technical interview went well. The senior engineer enjoyed the interview and provided positive feedback. It was one of the best technical interviews I've experienced, and I enjoyed it too.
However, the hiring manager explained that they had already extended an offer for the position before interviewing me, and that offer had been accepted. He asked me to let him know if there were any other positions I'd be interested in applying for, and he would be happy to forward my profile. He also mentioned that the only open positions were for junior SDE1 roles and asked if I was interested in that path.
Unfortunately, that was the last correspondence I received.
I responded confirming my interest in applying for SDE1 roles and asked for a general salary range for that level. I was concerned about relocating to San Francisco on a junior salary and wanted to ensure I could manage financially.
After several days with no response, I messaged again, listing a few positions I was interested in and asking if he could forward my profile for them.
A week passed with no reply.
I eventually applied for those positions directly. A few days later, I sent a follow-up email informing him that I had applied through the Twitch job board and reiterating my request for him to forward my profile.
Again, there was no response.
It has been a month, and I have since moved on and accepted an offer elsewhere.
It's still disappointing because I genuinely like Twitch from a user perspective and was very excited about the prospect of contributing to a product I enjoy using and am a huge fan of.
I still like Twitch and will likely apply again in the future. I just wish I understood why communication stopped.
Questions
Why do you want to work at Twitch?
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 3 interview experiences for the Twitch Frontend Engineer role in San Francisco, California.
Success Rate
Twitch's interview process for their Frontend Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having mixed feelings for Twitch's Frontend Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.
Twitch Work Experiences
- 2.0Twitch used to be a great place to work. Don't expect that for much longerSoftware Engineer • Former EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesAugust 6, 2017Pros: - Great food perks, though these have slowly been dwindling each passing week. - Smart people; there are a handful of bright individuals that help you learn. - Strong brand and a great, loving community. - Flexible work schedule.Cons: - Misguided CEO who tries to take on too many roles (we have no CTO, CPO, or arguably CEO) - Constant reorganizations without clear alignment and direction - Inadequate management: While there are a handful of good managers at Twitch, an overwhelming majority are poor (first-time managers, subpar engineers) - Toxic culture: Adversarial relationships are rampant at the company, and the product reflects this division - Compensation and vesting schedule is below market - Morale has been slowly taking a dip
- 2.0Real Life Twitch ChatSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesFebruary 4, 2016Pros: - Gamer's haven with PC and console rooms, arcade, and live esports viewing. - Food, perks/benefits, and time off.Cons: Twitch as a company largely reflects its online culture: gamers with egos larger than their talent creating a disorganized workspace where the louder your scream, the more you get noticed. Quite literally, the internal chat could be a snapshot of Twitch chat. If you like to game, argue, and fight, you'll love it here. Upper management has lost control of the company; people say and do whatever they want. Imagine an environment where directors/VPs set the precedent of yelling, screaming, and throwing fits over a game. Imagine an environment where angry gamers never learned to behave; that's Twitch. If you want a professional environment to develop and grow, you're better off looking somewhere else.
- 5.0Twitch is a great place, which went through a rough patchSenior Software Engineer • Current EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesJanuary 20, 2018Pros: Our biggest problem (at least on our team) is that we have a vision to build systems and tech much larger than today's, and the problem set is hard. It's rare to get to work on technical problems like this as a day job. Amazon honestly is very lenient on us. We get to choose our tech stacks, tools, methodologies, etc. Their approach is not a top-down one where you are told which CI system or tool to use. There are teams building support systems, and as an engineer, you literally own your destiny and pick the best tools for the job. The amount of freedom we have in terms of proposing projects that actually happen is really good. We have practically no restrictions on equipment and tech resource availability. The amount of freedom to pick and use open-source or AWS resources is really, really good. As someone who worked in the past at places penny-pinching, or where asking for compute resources were months-long requests to finance, this availability makes me super happy. The company does listen to feedback and take it seriously. Management actually cares about people and gives priority to this. There has been a lot of movement lately to actually address pain points brought up.Cons: - Office coffee leaves much to be desired. - Late 2016/2017 were rough. We suddenly got a ton of external competition from heavy hitters (YouTube, Facebook). The company went gung-ho on features and catch-up, which was hard but necessary. We are in a much better spot today, but it was hard on people. - Twitch had a mix of legacy systems from the Justin.tv days, along with the newer ones. Literally, the whole company spent a large amount of time last year working on the very unsexy problem of cleaning debt. This was also hard on everyone, but we got rid, for the most part, of massive chunks of tech debt. - Some parts of Twitch do suffer from "not-invented-here" syndrome. We could leverage more external and Amazon's tools, which will free up time to work on other larger technical challenges.
Twitch Interview Questions
