I applied in-person. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Samsara (Cambridge, MA) in Sept 2019
Interview
The interview consisted of two major segments: a 15 minute segment about conveying past experiences and skills acquired, and a 30 minute coding exercise. There were five minutes at the end of the interview for me to ask questions about the company.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Tell me about some of your past experiences and tell me about the type of work you would like to do at Samsara.
I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Samsara in Sept 2023
Interview
Coding pre-screen, HR, Coding interview, Another Coding interview, system design, and lastly HR again. A lot of interviews to go through. Yup, sure is a lot of interviews. There were a lot of interviews, yes there were
The company takes a shotgun approach to recruiting, in that they interview many more people than a typical company would for a role. They weed people out based on who can best spew code in 45 minutes for an inane problem that in no way represents anything that anyone would ever code. The code is then evaluated by a machine learning system! For the interview, they pair you with an actual person, but that person in my case didn't even know the language associated with the role I was interviewing for! The company does not want unique, creative, people. The company wants code monkeys.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write code to represent a safe deposit box. The problem with this question is that the U/X, and the interactions with the "real world", are what matter but the interview could not answer much about those aspects. The code itself is nonsense absent a clear and complete analysis of U/X.
