I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Intercom in Oct 2015
Interview
Round 1: You get an email with 3 or 4 questions. Two of them will be programming questions. You will then answer the questions and emailing them back. They focus on code testing so make sure to provide unit tests cases. They also want to your code to be production ready which is just a buzz word means they want your code to be very modular and flexible to accommodate unexpected changes without rewriting too much and can scale really well. And it should be extensible.
In the email, they provide you with a lot of information on what they expect from you. And a list of blog posts from intercom on how they hire engineers which they were very helpful.
In the second round, you will get a Skype or hangout interview.
In my case, the interviewee begins the interview by submitting a Url of a image. The image was basically how flood fill algorithm works taken from Wikipedia.
Which was not that bad to program but he asks questions on how to make the code productions ready. He also suggest to use inheritance to make the code flexibility so other developers can add more behaviors.
Then he asks a couple of questions about OO design. And why you test you code. Finally, some behavior questions which I thought the interviewee could not handle them and create good context. His questions does fit perfectly with the context of the problem.
There is a third interview if you managed to to pass the second round. It focuses on culture fit.
But, they rejected me after the second round which was very disappointing. They provided me with a great feedback I really appreciate as not many companies do it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
flood fill, flatten an array, find customers within 100k
I did one interview round, and didn't progress to the next one, it was technical on hackerrank. And another behavioral one which was pretty good. They seem to have nice culture.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It was a load balancer, managing multiple representatives that take calls with max capacity, and create a queue of who would pick up the calls in order.
Algorithm/problem solving interview where you solve a problem and explain your thought process at the same time. I was asked to improve the runtime of the solution too.
Culture interview where you/they try to gauge whether there is culture alignment.
System design interview where based on product requirements you come up with a design.
Role chat where you are given an opportunity ask questions about the role, which is actually nice.
Coding / pairing on a practical problem where you are asked to build a product, code quality doesn't matter much. This is the bit that failed me apparently. But the feedback was absolute tosh. I built and delivered what was asked, and instead of focusing on this concrete FACT that I delivered, the feedback said something like "he didn't seem overly familiar with fullstack environment" (no really Sherlock? read my CV, I've mostly been a backend engineer) and apparently the feedback wasn't challenged internally. So 1 person can swing the decision if they don't know what they are doing or simply doesn't like you. They need to sort this out and start challenging feedback that isn't based on data/anecdote (whether it's positive bias OR negative bias). I'm annoyed with them as well the recruiter was slow/missed our meetings and took too long to respond. It is possible they were waiting to interview other candidates for the same role hence the delay in communications.
In the end the feedback didn't make sense, I didn't get anything useful out of the process. I won't be interviewing here again, this is not how you treat people.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Algorithm/problem solving interview where you solve a problem and explain your thought process at the same time. I was asked to improve the runtime of the solution too.
Culture interview where you/they try to gauge whether there is culture alignment.
System design interview where based on product requirements you come up with a design.
Role chat where you are given an opportunity ask questions about the role, which is actually nice.
Coding / pairing on a practical
It was long yet nice interview experience. Initial rounds were easy but as you go along, there were difficult interviews. But eventually i didn't make it to final stages. Home assignment was not that difficult.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I needed to design a prototype where user can build stories.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Intercom with 2.9 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 58% positive. To compare, the company-average is 47.3% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 20 days to get hired, when considering 12 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Intercom overall takes an average of 23 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Intercom as a Software Engineer according to 12 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 25%
One on one interview: 19%
Skills test: 19%
Presentation: 16%
Personality test: 9%
Background check: 6%
Drug test: 3%
Group panel interview: 3%
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