Applied for a Software Development Engineer (SDE) position. The recruiter was very fast in responding. We set up an initial 30-minute phone chat to discuss my resume, technologies I've worked on, and so forth. The next step was a one-hour technical phone screen.

For the phone screen, I paired with a senior developer who was not a member of the team I applied for. This was understandable, but it also caused some problems with the interview's direction. My interviewer must have been looking for questions based on my resume. Since he saw the words "full stack," the first question he asked involved aligning three letters in separate divs into three columns (with a bonus for responsive design) on a simulated webpage by making CSS changes. While I have worked with CSS before, that's not what I'd consider my area of expertise, and I certainly wouldn't be able to whip something like this up within 10 minutes. If I had prepared for it beforehand, then certainly—it's CSS, not red-black trees. However, the team I was applying to does not mention web development at all; the recruiter said they are working with Python, so I was not expecting to be tested on CSS.

As a consequence, I fumbled around for 10 minutes and must have looked foolish.

If I were to judge, the next question didn't go so well either. I'd say the question was initially poorly worded and included no examples of the expected input and outputs, something I'd normally expect to see. As a result, I initially programmed in the wrong direction and had to fix my approach after the interviewer clarified the question. That led to some messiness.

One piece of advice I'd like to offer to the interviewers at Zillow, if you're reading this, is not to make specific assumptions about what candidates may or may not have done based on their resume. I came into the interview expecting to be asked architecture, data structure, and algorithm problems typically expected for the back-end position I applied for. Instead, I was thrown way off by a CSS question, as if I were primarily a web developer (which, if you couldn't tell already, I am not). Who knows, maybe I'm brilliant at solving your back-end challenges, but alas, we'll never know now, will we?

GIVEN:

html

USING CSS:

// Make a 3-column layout that is: // • Full width of the page // • Even width columns // • Gutter space in between (width doesn't matter, just an even gap between each is fine.) // • Responsive. Stack the columns on displays narrower than 320px // For a challenge: // • Make the center column wider than the outer two. // • Make the first column (A) appear farthest to the right, without changing the markup order. // // Browser should look like this: // ------------- // |A |B |C | // | | | | // | | | | // | | | | // -------------

// Make a simple function that returns the minimum value of 0 or more integers. Without using built-ins such as Math.min(), etc. // Example: [6, 2, 33, -3, 3, 6, 10, -1] should return -3.

// Write a function that takes a string and returns its length without using built-in properties (such as .length or .size()).