This was a very disheartening interview process. During the process the feedback was good at every step until the very end. I was ushered to the final interview, a hands-on project/exercise only to be told they weren't happy with a previous interview I was told went well?
First, I completed the application which included three/four videos answering their questions.
Second, I completed a one-on-one Skype interview with the team leader/manager.
Third, I completed their on-site interview and was told my interview went well and they wanted me to complete the final web app project, Great!
Finally, I spent three days completing the final exercise/project.
Approximately twelve days after finishing the project, I heard back from my recruiter that my final exercise & technical grasp were good. However, they changed their mind since they decided an earlier on-site interview step I completed showed I was not a good fit. I was told I cut off an interviewer and spoke over them. Warning, don't get nervous or talk too much, which I clearly did.
The urgency of filling this position at Pason started to become a red flag for me half way through the process. They allot 30 days for you to complete the final hands-on exercise, at least that is what they gave me? Also the time between each interview step described above was as long as 10-14 days? I had a big concern that maybe they are not really wanting to hire and instead want to test out their hiring process. Be aware!
Anyway I would not recommend this company, but if you do go forward here are the details.
There was an application process with three/four video recorded answers to questions they supplied. I can't recall the questions but were less technical and more about your background and thought process.
This went well enough so they scheduled a one-on-one Skype interview with the team leader/technical manager.
This also went well and they wanted me to come into their office for an on-site interview with the team(4 people, 2 in Calgary & 2 in Houston). They asked about a few of my different jobs on my CV, personality questions like challenges, hurdles, etc.
During the interview they had 20-30 technical CS questions. The questions went well as I had a couple thumbs up while answering them. I am pretty sure I nailed all but one, so I think you will find them easy if you have a CS background and some solid experience.
Within the next day or two they wanted to give me access to a private git repo with a starter project. This is a project which they give you 30days???? to complete. Anyway I put in three afternoons over the xmas holidays and submitted it to them for review.
If you look at the Pason Power website you will see some screen shots of their products. This will give you an idea of the exercise.
The exercise project requires you to implement a charting web app in React based on some old sample energy data. The repo contains a README with details, build/setup, and expectations.
For the exercise I had a Redux store. I needed just a single reducer and a few actions/action creators. I recommend you:
- fetch the sample data from a Docker container w/ Influx DB+sample data, included in the the repo.
- be able to allow sub-selection of the data by date range.
- display the aggregate of the data returned; min/max/mean. I just used the InfluxDb's SQL and returned both the data and the results of the mean, min, and max functions.
I created three React components which were wrapped within a parent container.
- Charting component using a charting library like Chartist, Recharts, or D3 but it's up to you.
- Filtering component for choosing the range of data to chart
- A component to render the min, max, and mean of the data
A few other notes on the exercise. They use 'semantic-ui' components so make sure you use these UI library with your components. You need to query InfluxDB from the Docker container, as long as you can do a simple SQL statement you should have no problems. You can query it from your app using HTTP requests, I just used the built-in fetch operation and promises.
Good luck!
