I was scheduled firstly for an on-site interview because of a referral. Three days after that, I got a call from one of the interviewers that I would have a Skype phone call with the founder of the company a week later. Three more days after that Skype call, I got a call from that interviewer again, saying that I had an offer.
The on-site interviews were all coding-based – they asked me questions that looked initially easy but blew up in my face, and questions that were just hard from the beginning. I had to ask for help for at least a quarter of them, and the interviewers also helped me debug 2 of them. I couldn’t answer one. I must say that it was, though grueling, an interesting, and in some ways, a fun experience.
Overall, this company was pretty intense. One of the things I noticed first when I went for my on-site interview was that the employees loved coding, and the company of others who love working with tech like they do. They're all extremely smart, and they enjoy that extremely intelligent atmosphere - they can all hold each other up in projects, and also work on all kinds of different things. It also means many of them can interview you - when I went on-site, I was there for 9 hours, and was grilled by 5 different people, for 1 hour each.
If you are going for an interview here, remember to be yourself. Though you will be interviewed alongside master’s student candidates, and maybe even people from out of the county, this is one of the most important things. Though it may seem like at such a high-stakes company, and you want to put your best out there, it is especially important to be real. Don’t stretch the truth about what you can or can’t do, and at the same time, don’t be intimidated by all of the flashy stuff (like a limo to the company, etc). They are looking for a good fit, and a good fit is a hard worker who is smart but doesn’t ruin their atmosphere of equality among all their workers. Sure, you’ll need a certain degree of professionalism to get this job, but this is equally important.
