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      MathWorks

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      Principal Software Engineer Interview

      Apr 28, 2015
      Anonymous employee
      Natick, MA
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at MathWorks (Natick, MA) in Jun 2014

      Interview

      Day long interview process. You are asked to provide a technical presentation, which is followed by one-on-ones. Interviewers are selected from different teams providing you multiple opportunities to show your strengths.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      What is metaprogramming?
      Answer question

      Other Principal Software Engineer Interview Reviews for MathWorks

      Principal Software Engineer Interview

      Oct 30, 2012
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Natick, MA
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at MathWorks (Natick, MA) in Oct 2012

      Interview

      The process began with a 1 hour phone interview with the hiring manager. That discussion centered around reviewing my background and experience and also my goals and expectations. The next step was a phone interview with an engineer on the team to focus on technical issues. We spoke over the phone and used a shared Google Docs document which they had pre-populated with some sample code. The sample code was a class that represented a collection of data and had an insert() function and a display() function. The idea was to have the display() function be called whenever the data is changed (via insert()). The suggestion was given that there was a cleaner way of handling this and the engineer kept pointing out that there was a problem with needing to reference from a different file -- but what they had in their mind was the need for an Observer pattern. Never did they mention that what they wanted was the ability to have multiple listeners so I thought this problem was not setup very well -- especially because I'm familiar with observer pattern and have used it many times to solve problems that required multiple disconnected listeners. Next I was asked to go to the office for a full day of on-site interviews. The recruiter did a good job of explaining how the interview process would work and the reason for asking me to do a presentation, which all candidates at MathWorks are asked to do. I was asked to make a presentation for the first hour, which would be to all of the members of the team I was interviewing for. The contents of the presentation was asked to be 5 to 10 minutes on my background, education, and experience, followed by 30 to 40 minutes explaining in depth a project that I'd worked on previously. This made sense to me since those questions are asked repeatedly in most one-on-one interviews and the presentation allowed going over that only once before doing one-on-one interviews for the rest of the day. However, the presentation did take about two full days to prepare, including incorporating feedback from the recruiter and hiring manager prior to the interview. And I was also dissapointed that I had specifically asked ahead of time if I would have access to Chrome or Firefox for a demo of the project I was explaining, but during the presentation I had only IE and was asked to give the demo anyway, which I should have not done since the product I demo'd does not work well in IE and that looked worse than no demo at all -- I should have refused and pointed out that they promissed me the proper environment. The rest of the day went well with the one-on-one interviews. Everyone we very friendly and supportive. They all asked very good questions, some about general development processes, some about technical issues -- although I was not asked to work on any coding problems at all which surprised me. In the end, what I found troubling was that during the entire process I recieved almost no feedback on what they were thinking about the mountain of information I was providing. I did get one comment about my code being "overly complex" but other than that everyone was of a positive and supportive attitude but gave no indications that might allow me to better explain my situation. The recruiter notified me via email that they did not think I was the right fit. I asked the recruiter, who mentioned in the email that we should stay in touch about any possible future opportunities, if I was not a good fit for the particular group I interviewed with or for MathWorks as a whole, but I was completely ignored. I guess once they're done with you they're done with you.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      There were many, many questions. But no coding exercises beyond the technical phone meeting described above.
      Answer question
      3

      Jobs at MathWorks

      38 jobs in United States
      Senior Software Process Improvement Engineer
      Natick, MA
      ·
      $184K - $184K /yr
      (Employer provided)
      View job
      Senior C++ Software Engineer
      Natick, MA
      ·
      $210K - $210K /yr
      (Employer provided)
      View job
      Principal C++ Software Engineer
      Natick, MA
      ·
      $257K - $257K /yr
      (Employer provided)
      View job
      Principal Software Engineer - MATLAB Data Visualization
      Natick, MA
      ·
      $257K - $257K /yr
      (Employer provided)
      View job
      Principal Software Engineer - MATLAB Graphics
      Natick, MA
      ·
      $257K - $257K /yr
      (Employer provided)
      View job

      MathWorks interviews FAQs

      • Principal Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at MathWorks with 4.5 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 50% positive. To compare, the company-average is 55.2% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
      • Candidates applying for Principal Software Engineer roles take an average of 3 days to get hired, when considering 2 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at MathWorks overall takes an average of 20 days.
      • Common stages of the interview process at MathWorks as a Principal Software Engineer according to 2 Glassdoor interviews include:

        Phone interview:  20%

        Group panel interview:  20%

        Presentation:  20%

        One on one interview:  20%

        Skills test:  10%

        Background check:  10%

      • Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -

        1. Software Engineer(315) ;
        2. Senior Software Engineer(166) ;
        3. Quality Engineer(93) ;
        4. Applications Support Engineer(70) ;
        5. Intern(63) ;
        6. Engineering Development Group (EDG)(59) ;
        7. EDG Intern(51) ;
        8. EDG(45) ;
        9. EDG Engineer(38) ;
        10. Software Developer(38) ;
        11. Manager(35) ;
        12. Engineer(33) ;
        13. Principal Software Engineer(32) ;
        14. Applications Engineer(31) ;
        15. Software Engineer(Internship)(31) .


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