I recently did a set of interviews and a flyout to visit the Phunware offices in Austin and thought it would be good to report back my experiences to folks here on Glassdoor.
Even before flying out, I did three separate phone interviews (the engineering director, a senior engineer and then the CTO).
My impressions here are from the Austin office, I'm not certain what the work dynamic or office environments are like at the two other Phunware locations out in California.
The way my interview day was structured was that it was purely a "get to know you" set of interviews between me and my prospective co-workers. In other words, if you're invited on-site, chances are pretty good the hard core technical grilling is already finished. My interviews were divided into four sets, three of them were with a pair of co-workers while a fourth was with a project manager by herself.
The first team of interviewers were from the graphic design and "creative" team. These are the people who create the look & feel of a product. The second set of interviewers was a vice president and a senior project manager. The V.P. was the guy who brought the mildly challenging "why do you want to be a part of our team" questions, but I felt the questions were well thought out and he explained the rationale behind his questions, which was friendlier than being blindsided with them. The third interview was with a much younger project manager who had advanced herself from the creative team over into a different role (so it does look like, at least from my initial impression, that it is possible to pick up and run with new skills & responsibilities while working at Phunware). The fourth interview was with a collection of developers, who would be my direct co-workers, along with a development manager (who had an engineering background but wasn't involved in hands-on engineering in the slightest, from what I can recollect).
In terms of criticisms about the company, one interviewer lamented that he'd like to get more engineers engaged off-shore, which made me somewhat worried about job security. I also didn't like the set-up for engineers, most of whom looked like they were sitting in windowless rooms within the somewhat cramped office space (a mix of "open plan" long tables for the developers, pods for the creative people, and cubicles for the business people). While the north Austin office building is massive (with at least four different wings named "West", "North", etc.,), Phunware takes up two small office spaces within one of the wings. They'll be relocating to a larger space within this building sometime over the next bunch of months.
I went in expecting to be underwhelmed (primarily because of some of the scathing employee reviews here), but ended up being pleasantly surprised.
Unfortunately for me though, Phunware ended up turning me down. I did get post-interview feedback from my headhunter saying they thought I was full of hot air on a few of my answers regarding my educational and work history. Well, at least any feedback is better than the traditional no feedback.
But if you truly want to work at Phunware and if you can pass the technical phone screens while keeping yourself *humble* during the interview process, you should be a shoo-in. And if you find any of the advice I'm offering here as helpful, let me know by voting "yes" on the "Helpful?" question below.