Here’s a thread I thought I’d never be able to create: I just completed my first three days as a full-stack developer for a great young company here in Chicago.
This came as a total surprise, as I had been applying sporadically for the past year (and regularly since the beginning of 2018). I sent about 40 applications during the most recent sprint and nabbed several phone interviews, with only a couple moving on to technical interviews. The company I’m now with contacted me one day after applying, moving through a phone screen, coding challenge, video technical interview, and on-site interview before making an offer on February 28th. I started on March 7th.
Other than adjusting to a full-time office schedule, the job itself is a dream. I get to use Node, Vue, Bulma, and a variety of modern technologies to help build out an internal ad tech suite. The lead developer is very kind and helpful and is making the transition smooth. The office itself has a fully-stocked kitchen and nap room.
This forum has been a great help to me, as, even though I haven’t started many threads, I’ve learned a lot from checking in and reading others’ questions and answers. In fact, I got the Aficionado badge for visiting on 100 consecutive days.
I’m not good at giving details no one wants to know, so feel free to ask anything you’re interested in hearing more about.
Thanks for sharing and congratulations on the new job! It’s an exciting time!
Would you mind sharing more details about the technical questions you were asked during the interviews?
How long had you been studying coding prior to the interviews?
My technical interview was split into two parts: describing the technologies I had worked with and projects I had done, and discussing the coding challenge and screen-sharing while I fixed a bug in it. I got the sense that I would’ve been asked to implement a new feature on the spot, but fortunately I had already implemented it as a bonus feature before submitting! As a result, the bug was easy to find and fix: it turned out to be an unexpected behavior of a JS plotting library I had pulled from the internet. I felt I connected well with the lead developer and was able to communicate clearly while live-coding, and this helped me move on to the next round.
As for my background in coding, that’s difficult to answer. You can get some sense of my background from skimming this Medium article. Long story short, I’ve been creating websites in some form or another for almost 20 years. But I didn’t start getting serious about JavaScript or Node.js until about 2 years ago, and didn’t learn Vue or other front-end frameworks until last summer.
Yes, Bulma is very nice and easy to pick up coming from a Bootstrap background! A major advantage is that it doesn’t have heavy JavaScript weighing it down: for example, a modal can be opened just by toggling its is-active class.
What were the interview questions you were asked? What was the coding challenges like? I would like more information on what I can do to prepare for my own interviews and coding challenges.
The on-site interviews focused on getting me familiar with the company and the products I would be working on, as well as learning about my background. Honestly it felt as though I asked most of the questions!
The most technical question I was posed was how I would roadmap a possible future change to the product. I didn’t consider my answer very satisfactory, as I don’t do well without being able to sit in front of an overview of all the moving parts with some time to think about a solution. I guess it was good enough, however, as I’m typing this from the office on my break.
Your interviews will obviously vary wildly by company, but before interviewing I found it extremely helpful to review JS algorithms and data structures with this Udemy course by Stephen Grider. Although I didn’t need to use any of the specific algorithms presented to get this job, I picked up several techniques which are broadly useful.
