This article was cross-posted from Medium.
After a month of intense preparation and interviewing, Spotify was a breath of fresh air. I’d like to talk about the process of interviewing for an engineering role and why it was one of the better experiences.
Spotify uses a traditional tech company style of interviewing for full-time engineering roles. Here’s the general process:
- Phone call with a recruiter
- Technical phone screen with an engineer
- Onsite interview with 4 rounds (system design, code practical, algorithm/data-structure questions, and a non-technical discussion)
- Offer or rejection
The interviews try play to your strengths in that the questions are planted within the domain that you’re most familiar with (frontend, backend, data, etc).
In my experience, other companies vary this process with 2 technical phone screens, an onsite interview with 5 to 6 rounds, and possibly a take home project or coding test (either at the beginning or end of this whole process).
I’ve had some oddball companies bring me in for 2 onsites of 5 to 6 rounds each. Yikes.
Spotify excelled in hitting all of the important areas in assessing an engineer’s skill-set with focused questions and little to no delay between interviews. They knew what they wanted to extract and didn’t waste your time.
Anyone who has gone through interviewing with multiple companies can appreciate one that knows what they’re doing.