I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Quantcast (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter within 3 days after applying online, asking me for a first phone call. This call was mostly to present me the position, and also included some questions about my background. It didn't really feel like I was being evaluated. I had to complete some homework (write a simple command line program that performs some calculations on its input). This homework took me about 2 hours of work. After reviewing my solution I was invited for an on site interview.
There was 3 interviews, one with an employee from another team, one with an employee of the team I was applying for, and one with a technical lead of that team. All interviews were classical 1:1 technical interviews:
- Talk about my background
- Some general questions covering topics like systems and network programming, CLI use, and other software general knowledge.
- Coding exercise
- Open questions and presentation of their jobs
The most challenging part was the coding exercise. Focus was on simple algorithmics on arrays and trees. In one of the interview, the language was suggested (C).
One of the coding tests was on a variation of binary search which I couldn't get right in at least 40 minutes of interview, despite interviewer trying to help me. This probably cost me the job, together with not fitting exactly in the profile they were looking for.
There was no behavioral question, although I feel like
After about one week I received a thank you e-mail stating that I was not a good fit.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
What is the difference between threads and process?
What are advantages and disadvantages of each?
Interview went with 7 interviews but got rejection because one person say no, all other says yes therefore I am confused that majority is saying and it is not about the technical part.
Take home assignment and follow up on the take home. Easy take home and easy follow up. Expect to explain your thought process and extend the take home assignment with another engineer.
Interview Screening - Talked to a hiring manager in a video call talked about the company, my experience, salary expectations, the next interview would have been a technical interview, and then a live coding interview.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Quantcast with 3.2 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 52% positive. To compare, the company-average is 48.8% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 23 days to get hired, when considering 48 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Quantcast overall takes an average of 24 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Quantcast as a Software Engineer according to 48 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 43%
One on one interview: 21%
Skills test: 10%
Presentation: 8%
Background check: 6%
Group panel interview: 5%
IQ intelligence test: 3%
Personality test: 2%
Drug test: 2%
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