I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at CloudKitchens in Sep 2020
Interview
Initially, there is a recruiter call and it was pretty standard.
Next, comes the interesting part. There is a at-home coding challenge which they give you about a week to finish.
The challenge is not a typical interview question at all.
It is more like a college-level project where you build a complete application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The project requires you to code up a multi-theaded application to process some JSON and pass data between the threads, and do more processing in the receiving thread.
It requires full unit test coverage for the application, complete documentation for all public functions, extensive system logging, and more.
It will take you a few days to complete this project. I spent 15+ hours on it. If you are a perfectionist, you could spend much longer.
The only reason I did it was because during Covid time, there's not much else to do anyway.
I'm not saying there wasn't some fun in doing the project, but it way larger than needed to assess a candidate's skill.
I have to wonder if part of the real purpose of the challenge is to weed out candidates that have a full life. If you are not unemployed, the project will consume all of your free time for the week or so you have to do it.
Perhaps CloudKitchens only wants employees willing to often spend their entire weekend working, and this test is a way to weed out those that won't.
If you have time to kill and/or want a practice project, go ahead and do it. Otherwise, I don't believe it's worth it at all. Even pre-IPO Google never required anything like this.
First interaction is an HR Call talking about compensation which is not liquid. Then comes a take home assignment to create a multi-threaded kitchen delivery system. They say not to use AI yet even after spending hours on it there is no feedback given. Not worth interviewing, your time is better spent elsewhere
Had an initial call with HR. Mostly just going over my experience and housekeeping questions. Next round was technical coding round over zoom. I wasn't able to clear this round.
Quite intense to finish within an hour with explanation of the thought process + design decision
Line 0: The ID of the item
Line 1: The item type, either CATEGORY, DISH or OPTION
Line 2: The name of the item
Line 3: The price of the item for DISH and OPTION. Not present for CATEGORY items.
api interface function: menu parser, OOD.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are tasked with parsing menus from a large restaurant group.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at CloudKitchens with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 23% positive. To compare, the company-average is 32.6% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 21 days to get hired, when considering 22 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at CloudKitchens overall takes an average of 22 days.
Common stages of the interview process at CloudKitchens as a Software Engineer according to 22 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 33%
Skills test: 18%
One on one interview: 13%
Background check: 11%
Presentation: 11%
Group panel interview: 9%
Other: 4%
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