I was initially referred by an internal person, so I was fast-tracked through. The first was an initial call with a recruiter who was professional and super personable. I had a great chat with them and was invited to schedule a coding exercise, basically on the spot.

A few days later, I got on a Skype call to do a Codepen exercise with a current engineer in vanilla JavaScript. Basic DOM manipulations and parsing of nested data. Nothing too crazy. After that, I was invited for an onsite interview, which consisted of a five-hour marathon with no lunch break.

It was so tightly scheduled that there was basically no time to talk to the interviewers unless you completed the coding task extremely quickly, which, in an interview setting, is exceedingly difficult to do.

Most of the questions were fair and were again mostly vanilla JavaScript DOM manipulations and one question involving immutable objects in Typescript. The last question involved level-ordered binary tree traversal. The killer was the amount of time you had to do them, in addition to the mental fatigue of having to do them one after the other with no breaks. Overall, the interviewers were helpful rather than confrontational, though.

In the end, I was told that I was being rejected because of a lack of fundamentals with basic data types, which I applaud (skills over experience). But the fact that an entry-level front-end candidate be required to do anything with binary trees on the spot, I think, is overkill. I now know better and know binary trees and graphs inside out, but for this position, I question the value of this metric. I even asked the interviewer if I would ever be using this on the job, to which they responded with a chuckle, "No." My conclusion is that it was a weed-out.

Everyone was professional and nice. Answers to my questions and date expectations were clearly set and met. Organization is some of the best I've seen for hiring departments. But the time crunch and back-to-back coding challenges were exhausting, and at the end, I never really knew what my responsibilities would be, who the people I'd be working with are, or what they valued in an engineer. I felt that the holistic view of my skills as a person was thrown out the window in favor of an all-out coding frenzy.

TL;DR: While the recruiters were nice, the interviewing process as a whole was very mechanical and tedious. A mostly good experience overall, but with such limited time to speak to any of my future colleagues, it makes me wonder if Vimeo really knows who they're hiring as a person, beyond expert puzzle solvers.

Given a set of deeply nested JSON data, find the match according to ID immutably.

Find misspelled words that match an array of words. Highlight the words in a text.

Level-order traverse a binary tree and find all horizontal siblings and create a linked list, each node pointing to the horizontal neighbor node on the binary tree.