I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Smarking in Apr 2022
Interview
The interviewer greeted me with a good blend of enthusiasm. The collaboration experience was extraordinary. The engineer was very helpful and provided plenty of experience in big data. After the meeting, I did feel the company was one of those rare gems I will hear more about in the future.
I hardly noticed the hard-hitting interview questions as the engineer was very fluid in making it into a fun session to nerd out.
Definitely do your research prior to arriving. Going into it I had the impression I read the company was synonymously making the parking payment systems but I was way wrong. The team is much more serious about their contribution to helping decongest the parking real estate in urban settings. The perspective I've taken from it in my own words, they are civil engineers in data science.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Hard to remember but I was asked all the hard-hitting questions but it was so fluidly orchestrated I lost track of time. Learn your stacks, queues, data structures, databases, maybe compilers and data science to spark a conversation.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Smarking in Oct 2015
Interview
Intro phone call, phone screen, small coding assignment, onsite with four 1:1 interviews.
It was mostly a pretty standard interview process. There was an intro call, an algorithms phone screen, and a small coding project that involved making an efficient search/query with a clean API. Afterwards, I was invited up for a half day of interviews. I thought it would only be 2 hours long, but it was almost 4. Again, pretty straight forward stuff with a mix of high level ML/statistical discussions to algorithms questions with whiteboarding.
Then I had a "culture" interview I would best describe as an interrogation. It was extremely uncomfortable and downright hostile. I should have withdrawn my then and there. What really annoyed me what that the interviewer wanted new hires to be comfortable working 10-12 hour days and on weekends and that everyone was doing it. I gave a pretty neutral answer along the lines of, "I don't love that, but I understand its a startup and everyone needs to chip in" and he implied that I was lazy. Then he asked me a bunch of "soft" questions like, whats your greatest strength/weakness, biggest challenge, etc. Again, I was extremely annoyed and uncomfortable at this stage and really didn't want to be there anymore and I guess he picked up on that. Then he goes into this big spiel about how his biggest strength is that he's a "hustler, no bullsh*t". I'm interviewing the company just as much as they are interviewing me and decided this wasn't going to be a great fit.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a parking lots payment/occupancy history, how would you model/predict future occupancy rates?
