The initial hr recruiter was very nice and usually prompt with replying to my emails. He did an initial phone screen verifying the information on my resume and then set me up with a technical phone interview with another front end engineer.
The first technical interview went very well. The engineer conducting the interview was pleasant enough and knew what he was talking about. First we discussed my experience listed on my resume and I believe he was mainly trying to see how I thought about large projects, how I organized myself, how I manage multiple tasks. He also asked me about my team project experience, and dealing with troublesome members, etc. The next part of the interview consisted of technical questions mainly about front end technologies. He asked a lot about various CSS and cross-browser bugs and how to deal with them. Also various questions about JavaScript (some language specific syntax and such) and JavaScript optimization.
After the first phone interview I was green lit to do a coding test. The coding test, in my opinion, is very poorly designed. The problem I was given was an information retrieval problem that has been studied for years. There are lengthy college research papers on this topic and is an interesting problem to study for a few years in the academic circles. Making this a problem for a code test is ridiculous. You could literally spend years studying and researching the algorithm they asked you to create on this code test. They give you no guidelines or guidance as to how complete the algorithm should be so said to myself I would spend a weekend on this problem and that would have to be enough. Luckily, my work was enough and I was moved on to the next round. Also, they wanted the code to be unit tested. In my opinion that was the first sign this company didn't know what they were doing in the hiring process and I probably should have just deleted the assignment and gained my weekend back.
Having passed the code test, I moved on to the next round. I'm from out of town, so instead of an on-site interview I had to endure one more phone interview. This time, the interview went terribly. First, the interviewer was very awkward on the phone. I know these tech companies hire a lot of programming gurus that have little in the way of social skills but make it up in programming skills. However, these same people should not be allowed to conduct phone interviews. The interviewer would talk a thousand words a second, and then abruptly stop. Meanwhile, I would be making comments or otherwise being civil and sociable over the phone. Whereas the first interview would respond and we'd engage in conversation, the second interviewer mainly just breathed into the phone, making for a highly awkward interview. Second, I'm not entirely convinced this interviewer was actually a front end engineer. I spent three days studying nonstop for this interview, covering every single aspect of XHTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP, and it turns out NOTHING I studied ever came up during the interview. He asked me the same exact questions from the first interview regarding my resume and past experience. Then he delved into backend questions regarding SQL and databases. I know these are on my resume, but I'm not an expert in them and don't pretend to be. I'm being hired for a front end position not a back end position. Seeing as I was having trouble with his questions, instead of moving on to another topic, the interviewer delved deeper into the topics I wasn't an expert in. We ended up spending 20 minutes talking about data structures in databases and sorting algorithms. Then the interview abruptly ended because we were coming to time. Not once did he discuss ANY front end technology. There were no talks or questions regarding XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, or even PHP. So how he could assess my skills as a front end developer are beyond me.
Needless to say I did not get called in for an on-site. I asked for another technical interview because that interview was not appropriate for my position but of course these requests fell on deaf ears. I was simply sent a form letter saying good luck in your search. After all the time and effort you put into their interview process you'd think they'd have the decency to provide you with a hand written email or tell you why you are being let go. Frankly, I was and still am pissed about the process. It's obvious this company has no idea what they're doing with their hiring process. I would suggest you avoid this company. There are other companies out there with better hiring processes than Yelp. It also makes you wonder what kind of people they're really hiring and how far this company will go when they completely suck at looking for talent.
