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Front-end Software Engineer Interview Experience - Sunnyvale, California

October 1, 2013
Negative ExperienceGot Offer

Process

Short Version: Bad experience. Their recruiting system is a mess.

Long Version: I submitted my resume at a job fair. Then, I was invited to a dinner with several engineers. One week later, I was contacted for an onsite interview (yes, no phone screening at all).

Their campus is okay; there's nothing to complain about. It's similar to other big companies of its age (like "M" and "A"). However, I would say all tech companies that rate over 4 on Glassdoor will have a better office.

The interview was a complete waste of time for me. I'm a college new grad and a full-stack web developer, but their questions were all about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As we know, people don't typically learn these in college; "Treehouse" teaches that stuff. The questions were also quite unreasonable. There were many questions about "tricks" in CSS and JavaScript instead of more important concepts. By "tricks," I mean very detailed knowledge about CSS and JavaScript that can only be used to solve one specific problem. For example, how to block the click event of an <a> tag without using an event blocker? The answer is to attach an onclick function to the <a> tag and have the function return false. Seriously? If that's what you're expecting from candidates, you should be looking for experienced web developers who have been in the industry for years, not new grads like me. There were also some other crazy questions, such as writing a micro-website (HTML + CSS + JS) without looking at references.

I have to say I screwed up the interview because it wasn't actually the position I was looking for. They could have saved both of us a lot of time by conducting a phone interview beforehand!

Lastly, it was the worst part. I received a rejection email a couple of weeks later, and then was contacted by a recruiter with an offer. What? I asked the recruiter to double-check my status in their database, and it looked like two teams had actually read my interview feedback. One team rejected me and sent the rejection email without waiting for the response of the other team. It turned out the other team actually wanted me on board. However, at that time, I had already secured a much better opportunity, so I declined. Both the recruiter and the manager then called me, trying to change my mind without anything convincing. I shared my concern with the manager that I believed I wasn't the right person for their position.

Questions

Lots of CSS and JS tricks that I hadn't heard of.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Yahoo Front-end Software Engineer role in Sunnyvale, California.

Success Rate

0%
Pass Rate

Yahoo's interview process for their Front-end Software Engineer roles in Sunnyvale, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive0%
Neutral0%
Negative100%

Candidates reported having very negative feelings for Yahoo's Front-end Software Engineer interview process in Sunnyvale, California.

Yahoo Work Experiences