*Overall summary*:
30 min phone screening with HR, 1 hour behavioral interview with product design team via Google hangout, then a full day on-site interview consisting of a portfolio review, design challenge, 1:1 with PMs, lunch, 1:1 with engineers, and 1:1 with leadership team.
All interviews with HR, designers and PMs were a positive experience. The weird and negative portion of the interview was towards the end, with the engineers and the leadership team. It gave me the impression that all product-related interviews follow the same structure, regardless of whether the questions they were required to ask were *actually* relevant to the role. Another weird aspect is that they pull in people from around the company to interview you in pairs. Some of the pairs of people I interviewed with never worked together. Odd way to interview.
Feedback from HR throughout the entire interview process was fairly quick and timely, so that was definitely a plus.
*The 1:1 with engineers*:
This was the WORST portion of the entire interview process. The engineers asked me to present a design solution I'd worked on in the past. Then, they proceeded to ask me specifics on how the tech stack interacted with each design element I had come up with. I gave them examples on different types of feedback that my developers had come to me with and how we worked together to fix the design based on technical limitations, but I was pressed for really specific details on how the page worked on a technical level. I work very closely with developers in my current role, push front-end changes often directly in code, and do not consider myself to be a newbie to the intersection of design and tech and I found this interview portion difficult. For context, the role I was interviewing for was UX/research heavy and not tech-focused at all (even less so than my current role).
At the end of the interview, I was curious and asked "So how familiar with the tech stack are the designers at Spotify? Do they work super closely with front-end, and work with devs to come up with technical solutions on the back-end?" The answer I was given: "Mmm.. no, the designers here tend to just stay in design and don't really do tech stuff or front-end." OK, so why did you spend an hour grilling me on tech and engineering?? What was the point of the past hour and what were you actually trying to test me for if it isn't relevant to the role?? If you're going to ask engineering and architecture questions for a design role, then I would think it's for at the very least a role that's more front-end coding heavy and not UX heavy, right?
*1:1 with leadership*:
I spoke with two directors about leadership, and basically how I behave in an office. To preface the entire interview they started off by saying "Okay, we have this series of questions and most of them are related to leadership... but your role is not a leadership role. So answer these the best you can in the perspective a team player on the team, if you don't have any management experience. It's totally okay." Again... why am I being asked questions that are not specific to the role?
I was asked questions like "how do you build team morale?" and "describe your management style". Although this part of the interview was not as terrible as the engineering portion, it just again felt like they were just trying to go through a list of questions they were given regardless of whether it had any relation to the designer role I was interviewing for. I've never had an interview where the interviewers had to preface the questions with "so these questions don't REALLY directly relate to what you're interviewing for but let's pretend."
