There are plenty of companies out there use ambush interview methods.
A recruiter presented an opportunity with Fidelity Investment, and told me she’s had several candidates who broke down during their 3-stage, multi-panel interviewing process. I asked her if the candidates told her any reasons. She gave me two example questions: 1) How does video streaming work, and the platform you would implement it? 2) How does a SMS message get transmitted, and what would be the data structure like?
I laughed and told the recruiter I definitely wouldn’t break down because I had implemented those two protocols in the past when I was an embedded engineer. And I told her, Charles Schwab is on par on reputation with Fidelity except they conduct ONE technical interview and asked real world use case questions. What does video streaming or SMS messaging have anything to do with Asset Management applications?
It’s ridiculous. Wayfair hire third party interviewing companies to do their dirty deeds, asking questions which would have taken days or weeks to solve but expect candidates to provide answers within 30 seconds, and the algorithm test must be completed within 15 minutes. Along the way the interviewer kept interrupting candidates with questions. Maybe he thought he was helping?
Don’t work for those companies. Their ways of sifting through candidates are tell tale signs of how they will treat you once you step through their doors.
You deserve better.
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I did that once, time limit was one hour, the tasks were not so hard to archive. Then the last acceptance criteria was:
And I asked: which file, the one I am working on or the whole, including react, react dom, minified or not, etc.
They answered: the file I am working on only.
Me: how can I see that in this VM you gave me? There is only access to the editor view, but not to the filesystem, like open file window.
They: you are right, we don't know how this VM works. Sorry.
I failed the test, and didn't get an answer why. Maybe the file was too small?
After the result I was glad to fail it. What would they expect in the future? Develop a quantum server within one sprint as a janitor?
There are plenty of companies out there use ambush interview methods.
A recruiter presented an opportunity with Fidelity Investment, and told me she’s had several candidates who broke down during their 3-stage, multi-panel interviewing process. I asked her if the candidates told her any reasons. She gave me two example questions: 1) How does video streaming work, and the platform you would implement it? 2) How does a SMS message get transmitted, and what would be the data structure like?
I laughed and told the recruiter I definitely wouldn’t break down because I had implemented those two protocols in the past when I was an embedded engineer. And I told her, Charles Schwab is on par on reputation with Fidelity except they conduct ONE technical interview and asked real world use case questions. What does video streaming or SMS messaging have anything to do with Asset Management applications?
It’s ridiculous. Wayfair hire third party interviewing companies to do their dirty deeds, asking questions which would have taken days or weeks to solve but expect candidates to provide answers within 30 seconds, and the algorithm test must be completed within 15 minutes. Along the way the interviewer kept interrupting candidates with questions. Maybe he thought he was helping?
Don’t work for those companies. Their ways of sifting through candidates are tell tale signs of how they will treat you once you step through their doors.
You deserve better.