Rover.com Software Engineer interview questions

I flew through the tech screen and thought everything went fine. I talked about how I didn't just wanna be a cog in the machine, really wanted to help them solve problems for their users while thinking independently and helping push toward the company strategy from the bottom. I really felt great. Then I got an email saying they didn't get what they wanted from the first chat and would like me to make more time to speak with a manager. I told them I'd love to and then asked what we'd be chatting about as I'd like to be prepared. They gave me some super vague answer about how they can't say but it's usually culture fit questions. The time came and we chatted, I got asked the usual behaviorals and I knew I had set off some red flag when he asked if I had any questions, answered one of them and then basically asked me "if I had anything else to ask." From the tone in his voice, it seemed like he had one foot out the door and I knew he had already made up his mind. I'm really bummed by the interview because I loved what I heard about Rover's innovation team. I think Rover completely missed on this as interviews are not poker games and they're not games of battleship. What's the point of single blind play like this? I wish they had simply said "Hey man you talked about wanting to push from the bottom but we're worried about you being unhappy following directions against what you don't like" or something. Then we could have had a damn conversation about it instead of this game we play where they read into your entire personality and background based on their own assumptions. It's an echo chamber, man.

Applied November 2018 to a Software Engineering (University) role. First round: Coding Challenge on Hackerrank. I think the question involved strings. Regardless, it was pretty easy, just a weed-out test to see if you actually know how to code at a basic level. Second round: Technical Interview over the phone. Take turns with a recruiter implementing a class and its tests that parse a string and perform calculations on it. E.g, First turn interviewer would define a test to pass, then I would implement the functionality. Second turn I would define a test (to the recruiters specification) , and he would implement the functionality. Back-and-forth for a while. Overall pretty easy, and a good way of testing a candidate's ability to communicate and work alongside a team member. Lasted around an hour, with some time leftover to ask questions Third round: Ah, the dreaded Django coding project I heard about from glassdoor. No, You don't have to implement an entire web server. They give you a pre-built Django server, and ask you to perform some tasks on it. Deadline is flexible, but preferably turn it in within a week. You don't need to know Django or Python for this step, but it does help to have some experience with Model-View-Controller web frameworks. If you don't have this experience, don't sweat it, It's not too complicated and easy to pickup. First task is fixing up some bugs so the test will past. Some of the tests require other functions to be fixed, while some require the tests themselves to be fixed. Second task is refactoring a two methods that use similar code. I choose to implement a third method for this, but in hindsight it might've been worth looking into modifying the class itself. Third task is revising a feature to new specifications (I think it was modifying the stay length for sitters). Moderate difficulty, and there are a couple ways to go about it. Fourth task is implementing a new feature. Most of the implementation is already there, not too hard of a task. I maybe spent around 7-8 hours on it total, but it is easily doable within 3-4. After submitting, I was informed a day after that they were moving on to other candidates. As I spent a good chunk of time on the project (and I thought I did pretty well!), I asked for feedback. No response! Somewhat frustrating, but I understand. I think my code wasn't as clean as they liked, but besides that I have no idea why I was rejected. It's painfully obvious they are looking for people with experience in servers / web frameworks. Which is very... unusual to expect from University Undergrads. We aren't taught specific technology stacks, but rather concepts and general knowledge. Doesn't seem like a holistic way to run recruiting, but then again I'm just a slightly bitter Rover-hopeful! For the other undergrads applying to rover, don't be surprised about being rejected. It says nothing about your skills, but rather they are looking for a VERY particular type of programmer, not necessarily the "best" type.