I recently had a telephonic screening with them for Senior QA. The screening was scheduled for 30 minutes, of those 30 minutes, 10 minutes were spent on mutual introduction and knowing more about the work and job profile. The interviewer mentioned that currently more than 50% of the work is manual qa and they are planning to move to as much automation as possible. Well and cool so far.
Then comes the surprise in remaining 15-20 minutes I was asked to write a piece of code in google doc, which is basically finding the longest palindrome in a string. That's not a straightforward algorithm if someone has not practised that in the past. Usually you expect in google or amazon such questions for DEV positions, but I thought I was not interviewing for google or amazon.
I started working on the problem, with interviewer in background explaining me on how he would approach the problem. I did write a piece of code, but was not complete. As soon as 15 minutes passed by, the interviewer started pressing that i have to complete in 5 minutes as he has to hung up. Well I have practised few string algorithms in the past, but this was not one of those. Basically the problem with these startups, they are not in real world and behave as if they are going to create new set of human race or find water in Sun. How can a judge someone in 15 minutes with something which has no connection to real world problems. I have automation experience of 10+ years and worked in various distributed systems, don't recollect if finding the longest length palindrome was ever required. Come to real world, startup.