Had a pretty decent experience with the on-site and the engineering team, but a bad experience with the recruiter - ultimately ghosted. It seems that the way Sonos interviews may vary from team to team - I interviewed for a *frontend* team.
Steps:
- Initial call with recruiter. The recruiter was late, and his answers were vague and unhelpful (maybe because he’d only been there for a couple months), and did not make me excited about joining Sonos. He was also confused by some info clearly listed on my resume, and then he gave me questionable advice on it. (I’ve gotten many interviews with other companies, so I don’t think it was a problem.)
- Tech screen - a simple assessment in javascript; the engineer was polite and kind, seemed personable.
- A prep call with the recruiter. He completely forgot about the call, and I had to email him later. When I did get a hold of him, he was not very helpful.
- On-site (split across two days, interviewing with members on the team):
- React exercise - implement a feature in an existing component
- Debugging exercise - fixing js code in browser environment
- Programming exercise (any language, not frontend specific)
- Design / system debugging - troubleshooting an issue in a system (based on the team’s actual architecture)
- Behavioral - 30m chat with manager (a series of quick “tell me about a time” questions)
I liked the team I met with - they all seemed engaged and enthusiastic about the new product they were working on. I thought they had a lengthy but reasonable and creative interview process that tested many different aspects of coding. One of my interviewers remarked that it was unfortunate that all my interview panel only consisted of white males.
Unfortunately, I never heard back from them. The very lengthy and unprofessional experience left with me with a sour taste, which was disappointing because I liked Sonos as a company. The experience with the team was pretty good though, so maybe the engineering culture is still nice to be part of…