I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Handshake (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2020
Interview
I had a phone interview with their recruiter, a phone interview with the hiring manager and online technical challenge with their Lead Software Engineer. Overall the hiring process was fast, about 3 weeks.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
"Tell me about yourself" kind a question, working experience. Vending machine.
The process began with a standard recruiter screen followed by a four-level coding challenge. Unfortunately, the technical assessment was poorly structured. The requirements for each level were overly abstract, forcing candidates to make broad assumptions to pass the test cases rather than following clear documentation.
Furthermore, the coding environment lacked basic IDE features like IntelliSense. Requiring verbose code for complex, ambiguous problems without standard editor support felt unnecessarily tedious. I managed Level 1, but by Level 2, the lack of clarity made it difficult to stay engaged.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Something around timestamp based key value storage and retrieval. Then level 2 involved assigning priorities to each key and then retrieving the sorted list of keys and so on.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Handshake in Nov 2024
Interview
Standard tech interview with a take-home assignment. Not a leetcode brain-teaser but more basic code design.
Phone Screen
Technical Phone Screen
Virtual On-site
- Take home assignment, basic CRUD app
- System Design
- Behavioral
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical Phone Screen - Create methods to mock a vending machine. Vending machine should calculate change. User needs to call 2 methods, one to input change, one to select item, and 2 actions should be idempotent done in any order prior to vending items.
Virtual On-site
- Take home assignment, basic CRUD app
- Design a job board
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Handshake (San Francisco, CA) in Sep 2023
Interview
I hesitate to call my experience an interview, because, laughingly, I didn't even get to speak to the internal recruiter who originally reached out to me via LinkedIn. We initially had a date & time set, and the recruiter switched the calendar invite to a different day & time 10minutes before we were due to meet, without even the courtesy of informing me. As it turns out, that day & time were not good for me, so I suggested a different day & time, and sent the recruiter a note. The recruiter had accepted the 2nd invite, and I thought we were all set to meet via Zoom. I joined the call, but the recruiter never showed - totally ghosted. I haven't heard from the recruiter since