I applied online. I interviewed at Talkative (Newport, Newport, Wales)
Interview
Contacted by recruiter regarding position initially. Recruiter wouldn't/couldn't give salary information so proceeded to find the company online by investigation. Worked out it was Talkative and contacted them directly. There web contact form was spitting out errors which didn't fill me with confidence to begin with so contacted them by email. They replied and set up a phone interview. Next step was a technical test. Word count of a text file written in PHP. Instructions were very obtuse but a relatively simple task with 24 hours to complete. Done in 1. After submitting the test there was a long delay in response even after a polite follow up. The response was... "sorry you did not pass because there were too many warnings and the code could not process the larger text file" that was mentioned in the instructions. (the Bible) which is completely wrong as I tested the code myself on various sized files and it performed fine returning exactly what was being asked. So, there is clearly a hidden reason for not offering the position which will never be known but I would stay clear. It's a startup and they are probably being super selective in who they want to work with hiding behind this interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write PHP code to count the words of a string of text and return information regarding the overall count and avarage word length
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Talkative in Apr 2017
Interview
Recruiter contacted me and gave me a coding exercise in PHP to complete in 24 hours. The coding exercise was very simple: Count the words in a file, and return the most frequent word lengths.
There were no further instructions, apart from example input/output.
I completed the exercise but was rejected because I read the file outside of the function and passed it in as a string. They did not explicitly mention how they wanted this to be achieved. Note that I only had 24 hours for this task and no direct contact with the company (the recruiter was relaying messages between them) so I could not ask questions.
I would recommend graduates to stay away from this company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Count the words in a document, returning the most frequent word lengths
