I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Color in Apr 2020
Interview
Recruiter reached out to me via LinkedIn.
Step 1: Intro call with recruiter to talk about Color and their mission.
Step 2: I asked for a call with their product recruiter to learn more about what type of projects they had on the roadmap and the type of work I could expect.
Step 3:
1 hour technical phone call with another engineer. The interview question wasn't very difficult although they posed the question in a very vague manner. The engineer claimed they were a 'posing as a product manager' but when I asked the clarifying questions like I would a product manager, they didn't have any answers. And would just repeat the question prompt. I could tell the engineer was getting frustrated with me when I asked things like, what format of output do you want? What are your expectation for interacting with the models?
I was able to code up a decent solution after asking some clarifying questions from the interviewing engineer. I finished with plenty of time to spare. We chatted at the end for a minute and it seemed to go well. And I left the interviewing feeling like I had done well. Which is why I was surprised to have been turned down after this stage.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Can you model a dimmer switch w/ light bulbs of various wattage?
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Color
Interview
Standard recruiter screen
Second call with hiring manager: very bad experience here. HM had to be interrogated on the actual team composition before revealing the other 4 team members were around the country and working remote but that this position would have to come into office at Burlingame location (even tried to sell me a line about how great it would be to collaborate with other teams and leadership). Then tried to downlevel me to a more junior role despite seeing my experience and got offended when I suggested that maybe being in-person with the rest of the actual company could translate into more opportunities for me after a year. Ghosted me after that session.
From recruiter description rest of process was standard technical screen than a full onsite round.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
HM asked me about some past projects and whether I had any aspirations beyond the position level being hired for (senior engineer)
One HR call, followed by a one hour coding interview.
The problem I got was the same Painter implementation everyone else seems to be getting. I got it working, passed all test cases, with some time to spare.
The next day I got a rejection email. I asked the recruiter if they can provide any feedback and they said it's company policy to not provide any feedback. What?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Color in Jun 2022
Interview
Was reached out to by an external recruiter for Color multiple times. Talked to a hiring manager and then was sent for the coding challenge.
Had the barebones correct but couldn't get this dumb conversion they wanted. Even proposed an alternate solution.
Compiler was SUPER slow (>1 min) and that really screwed up my interview. Interviewer acknowledged that but continued to ask me to compile the code. He was "totally shocked" at how slow it was which i found pretty unprofessional. Like your tools for interviewing should work properly for a (basically) timed test or my pseudocode should be acceptable.
Was sent a denial email almost a week later with the standard rejection.