My experience echoes that of the other posts and that of former colleagues I know who have interviewed for the same position recently.
Round 1 was an introductory call with an internal recruiter who was friendly, personable and called precisely on time. He asked about the tenets of OOP and the SOLID principles, and mentioned that most software engineer candidates he speaks with can’t even name one of the SOLID principles. If you’re shaky on OOP and SOLID principles, have them up on a screen for the call and read from them. There’s really no reason anybody should fail this round.
Round 2 was an unproctored, Webstaurant-made HackerRank assessment consisting of approximately 18 questions. You have 90 minutes, which I think is plenty of time. Around 2/3 of the questions were coding problems, though most of the code is given to you so it’s not like an actual problem you’d find on HackerRank where you have to write all the code from scratch and worry about time and space complexity (big O). It’s more like “fill in the missing line”. Two were simple SQL questions testing you on intro-level stuff. No CTEs, not even a GROUPBY. The HackerRank “IDE” defaults to MySQL for these questions, so just keep that in mind if you are intending to write T-SQL (MS SQL) as there are slight syntax differences between the two. Around 1/3 of the questions were multiple-choice. If you get stuck, just use Google, ask ChatGPT or run the code in a local IDE. There’s really no reason anybody should fail this round.
Round 3 was with an “architect” at Webstaurant who had about as many YOE as I did, though I was interviewing for a position two or three pegs below him. It started off with a live coding exercise that I would say is not any more difficult than the code in Round 2, of course now you have someone watching you. I really appreciated that he did not once interrupt me as I spoke out loud, and only chimed in when I asked him a question directly. Love that. Too many interviewers will feel like they have to “help” the candidate. We are incredibly nervous, we are being watched, and we are told by every interview prep source to think out loud (nothing like the actual job we are interviewing for), and the last thing we need is to be made to feel stupid, slow or otherwise inadequate by the interviewer when we are interrupted mid-sentence, PUNISHED for doing what we are told to do (think out loud)… Anyway, the architect was great about this.
The live coding exercise, which you are officially given 45 minutes to complete, is kind of asinine. For example, there is a method in there you are asked to implement in the instructions; it’s a one-liner that returns whatever.Count(), and is never actually called by the program, which you cannot run yourself. The code can only be built and executed by the interviewer, so you rely on the interviewer to tell you whether the code is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s fine, but I would be absolutely floored if anybody made it to Round 3 only to blunder- I’m not really sure what Round 3 is supposed to be testing that Rounds 1 and 2 did not test, because I didn’t really have to think to complete it, so the architect doesn’t get to “learn how I think and work through problems” as these live coding interviews are typically for… A better coding exercise would be to have me build something from scratch, or perhaps to review some code I had written in the past that is freely accessible on my Github profile. Anyway, there’s really no reason anybody should fail this round.
After the coding exercise, I was grilled on technical trivia about C# and programming in general for 2.5 hours (yes, two and a half hours). I felt like I was asked some questions that the architect himself did not know, or only knew because they knew ahead of time that they were going to ask the question. This experience aligns with others’ I know who interviewed for this role. We’re all concerned about the seniority of some of the architects, and that’s a big, red flag.
Following this interview, the recruiter emailed me saying I have just one interview left (a cultural fit interview with a manager), but stated that the salary band for “Senior Software Engineer I” is $110-140k, which was below what I gave as my salary expectations. It turns out they have several levels within "Senior", and Senior I pays up to $140k. To make a dime more, the "architect" you interview with must decide you are Senior II (whatever that is). This is of course absurd. Don't take a senior role for anywhere near $110k in 2024. I’m interviewing at companies whose Senior pay bands START above Webstaurant’s max- there isn’t even overlap. Suffice it to say, this is where my journey with Webstaurant ends.
