I recently completed a full day of interviews at Yuzu (a division of Barnes and Noble) and thought it would be worthwhile to recap the experience to help other candidates down the road.
Yuzu’s business is one where they are trying to create software which replaces the bulky, expensive text books that students carry around at university and college, and they’re banking on Barnes & Noble’s presence at more than 650 schools around the country to provide them with exposure (and critical mass). Now I’m not convinced this “Netflix for Textbooks” approach (where one can buy or simply “rent” for a semester) is going to ultimately be a winner for B&N, but it certainly seems a more promising gamble than the one B&N took with the Nook (anyone remember that?). The role I interviewed for was a desktop (or laptop, to be more precise) engineering position, as Yuzu has figured out that most students prefer to work with their laptops on campus. This focus makes sense to me — I’m a few years out of University myself, but the times I’ve dropped by any campus more recently, everyone was carrying and making use of laptops and mobile tablets were certainly not a preferred device of choice.
For me personally, the Mountain View office was very inconveniently located (I would have been doing public transit from San Francisco), but if you were going to be taking Caltrain from anywhere on the peninsula, there’s a shared commuter shuttle bus that picks up at the Mountain View Castro street station (if I remember correctly) and it eventually meanders around to where Yuzu’s office is. I was warned that parking might be an issue at this location, but it didn’t turn out to be a problem for me once I got onsite. The building was under severe renovation when I visited, so I entered via a nondescript employee door on the side of the building. Everyone was in individual cubicles with high walls, although this could possibly change once the construction finishes up (which I think would happen early in 2015). I actually very much liked the fact that everyone I spoke with had dramatically different ages (while a couple folks I spoke with were late 20’s or early 30’s, other interviewers were definitely well into their 50’s), which shows that the company appears to appreciate maturity.
The way Yuzu structures their interviews is this: there’s an initial conversation with the hiring manager, then step two will be to come in for a half day’s worth of interviews in their Mountain View office. The recruiter will likely give you a schedule with a list of the people you’ll be speaking with so you can look up their LinkedIn profiles and backgrounds just to be ready for anything they might throw at you.
In my day, I spoke with six people across four hours. Most of them wouldn’t be direct peers (except the hiring manager and the QA person), although a couple of the people I spoke with did have experience in fields closely related to what I would be doing. As far as I could tell, the hiring manager really wanted to land me and perhaps coincidentally, almost all of my in-person interview discussions were very non-technical, more fuzzy and more culture-fit-like. The first guy was an Android Engineer, the second an iOS engineer, the third guy was a “Senior Software Engineer” (and he was the only guy who asked me anything remotely technically challenging), then a UX person and then a QA person. These last two were substitutes from the originally scheduled people but since they were there to check on my culture fit and not technically grill me, I wasn’t too stressed out with them. The last person I spoke with was the hiring manager, who was an extremely friendly and pragmatic guy.
Yuzu turned me down in the end, which was quite a disappointment. The headhunter didn’t offer me any specific feedback as to where I went wrong, but I suspect it had a lot to do with the fact I was very unwilling to commit to commute 2+ hours each day to and from the office, and it was made clear that the role I was interviewing for required the new hire to be on site five days of the week. I can see where they are coming from, but I didn’t think this was a reasonable requirement — the office is in the middle of nowhere (I didn’t see any restaurants within a mile of the place) and almost all of my engineering roles have had the majority of my time devoted to focusing on the screen in front of me while trying to mentally block out the distractions (or Nerf gun battles) behind me or in cubes close by. Oh well.
Hopefully my experience flunking the Yuzu interview will help you to prepare to pass your interviewing day. If you find any of the information in my interview review helpful, please let me know by voting "Yes" on the "Helpful?" question below (this helps to motivate me to be as detailed as possible).
