Candidates applying for Engineering Manager roles take an average of 90 days to get hired, when considering 2 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Twitch overall takes an average of 25 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Twitch as a Engineering Manager according to 2 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 100%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
It was heavily focused on people management and less on technical depth
It was heavily focused on people management and less on technical depth
It was heavily focused on people management and less on technical depth
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Talk about your previous experience building and managing an engineering team
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Twitch (San Francisco, CA) in Sep 2018
Interview
Recruiter finally contacted me approximately 3 months after an internal referral!
The initial interview with the recruiter went well and was followed up very quickly.
The interview with the hiring manager was scheduled very quickly and consisted of mostly very thorough leadership and behavioral types of questions so it went very smoothly as well. The hiring manager was very courteous and professional. However, the next step of the process did not go as smoothly as there seemed to be a total disconnect and lack of alignment with the rest of the leadership team. During my first technical interview, I was told that Twitch is looking for a leader with strong "People Management" skills and that they already have a lot of capable senior engineering staff so for this engineering manager role, they are not looking for someone with coding skills. Also, that Twitch is growing very aggressively and thus the team will likely double fast leaving no time to code anyway. Therefore before the next steps, I pinged the technical recruiter for more clarity so I could be better prepared. But the recruiter probably didn't know the specifics so gave me a very general response with no clear direction.
So for the next technical interview, the interviewer showed up 10 minutes late, then neither apologized nor did he give me extra 10 minutes during the interview! This behavior seemed very unprofessional to me.
Furthermore, there was a technical problem given which was fairly straightforward, but I struggled with the CoderPad tool provided as it splits an already small window making it difficult to type fast as one has to keep scrolling up and down to view the entire code. Plus when I tried to compile, it spits out way too many errors that were not appropriately flagged. For instance, an undeclared variable is tagged repeatedly confusing the developer. In all honesty, my nerves got the best of me and I probably seemed confused in the beginning. The interviewer was not able to calm me down. All along I knew how to solve the problem and he even said I was on the right track when I provided the steps to resolve it but he became impatient and stopped me when it was still about 15 minutes to the hour when the interview was scheduled to be over.
IMHO, Twitch and other companies need to take a step back and revisit their interview process. In a typical job environment, candidates use IDEs for coding, and language and API references are readily available online as well as books can be referenced as required. Not every engineer is comfortable coding using limited or buggy tools and it is very hard to code while talking out loud while every word you type is being judged.
And in general, why would a hiring manager tell a candidate one thing whereas another 2nd level manager have very different expectations for the same engineering manager role?
IMHO, if managers are to be evaluated for their coding skills, then it may be most effective to assign them a "take home" assignment instead!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Have you received negative feedback about yourself and how you handled it?