Twilio HackerRank OA for Segment Team L3
This was my 4th technical interview/assessment I’ve completed in this job search so I’d admit I’m a bit rusty for my own liking. Long story short… it went baaaad! The reasons I started entertaining interviews before proper prep were because: (A) Literally half the team left, with no replacements. Honestly they beat me to the punch, so no feelings like that. Thing is that two of them did at the same time. (B) Ive been getting bombarded with messages on LinkedIn, all from top companies. Hard to say no. (C) I wanted to take some mock interviews with companies of less interest. But as soon as I applied I started getting calls. My timing has been way off. Usually it would take a week or two to get a response. The other companies I’ve interviewed with were Etsy, Square, PayPal, in that order. I fumbled pretty bad during my first. It was expected, although I did solve the question, the collaboration aspect felt off. Square I thought I did okay and perhaps better than I expected. I assumed I would get the virtual on-site but no luck. PayPal went pretty well and just got the invite for the virtual on-site. Last thing I would say is that all of these interviews have been live coding/ screen sharing. Now, let us address today’s SNAFU. Twilio conducts their Online Assessments via HackerRank. It consisted of 2 questions and was timed for 60 minutes. The first had to do with array and hashmap manipulation. Think sliding windows or two pointers pattern but with a twist. The second question was not a LeetCode problem but there was some starter code for a ReactJS application. Had to implement 2 features and some styling bugs. With 2 extra features for sorting and filtering the contents that are rendered. Here is my issue with HR as a platform. The array/hashmap question is similar to one found on LC, but slightly different. However, the format in which HR present the content takes like an half the interview to read. They make you click on the ui to show the test case and the explanation. I have a harder time getting test to pass because of the input formatting (I use JavaScript) I had never seen a ReactJS app rendered within HR. Almost like codesandbox but not as nice. Anyhow, these problem also had an entire READ.me file detailing how to run the project. When you can just press the play button, yeah I figured this out late in the game. Even when you first run it, it took a little more than a minute to boot up. No hardware of internet limitations on my end. Idk this left me shook to be honest. Part of me wants to account my poor performance on not having enough interview prep. The other part of me wants to blame HackerRank. And yet another part wants to be realistic and say that some companies are out of their mind thinking that this could be done in 60 minutes or less. If given a choice on the type/style of technical screen for a job interview my preferences, in-order starting with the most favorable are (1) whiteboard or live coding challenge (2) online coding challenge without an engineer present (3) take home project TC: 🥜 YOE: 3 #twilio #segment #swe #whiteboard #hackerrank
the react app portion does sound pretty intimidating if all you were expecting was LC style problems. were you forbidden from googling around in other tabs for help? if so I imagine a lot of failing on that one, so perhaps they’ll evaluate you against the baseline instead of pass/fail on 100% tests passing.
Hey OP, I have a hackerrank from Twilio I’m going to do tomorrow. Was your role React based/ front-end based? I’m applying for an iOS role so I’m wondering if I’ll get something similar but for mobile. That aside, don’t worry about getting caught off guard. Seems like you’re having no trouble getting interviews, so with some practice you’ll definitely land something nice!
Yes the role was front end heavy. It was listed as full stack but the recruiter made it clear they were leaning towards a front end heavy engineer. I felt even more confident because that’s my bread and butter. Thing is I took too much time on the first problem. The second problem as I mentioned has a full blown READ.me file detailing how to run the program and some dependencies. Read the problem statement and by the time I got to poking around the code there was like 10 minutes left. There was a whole project dir in there had to open the files to read the contents. It wasn’t like pass a prop to a component in the same page or something. That’s what I meant when I said I feel it’s unrealistic to do it in that env with those conditions. Wish you the best of luck. I would still like to interview with them but I would rather wait before trying again.
1) 2) 3) for me in that order. But look sometimes we have off days or a problem that just gets us. I had an interview yesterday that honestly wasn’t that hard and I explain my solution and we agreed it was optimal then I fucked up the code and ran out of time.. it happens. Gotta just keep going
Yeah, I also don’t think the problems were particularly difficult. I’m also trying to be subjective and trying to take as many factors into consideration. But you know, as engineers it definitely hits us when we perform badly knowing we could have done better. On to the next!
Exactly! The perfectionist in me is hurt and my ego but once I brush it off I just move to the next. Already got 3 on sites in the next 2 weeks. Good luck with the next!