I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at SMART Technologies (Calgary, AB) in Jul 2019
Interview
This is the most rigorous interview process I have ever seen; I can't imagine they actually hire anybody using this process given that the company doesn't really do anything interesting anymore, and the compensation isn't very good.
(1) 1 hour video call with a classic LeetCode style problem. This was easy.
(2) Write a ridiculous programming assignment and send it back to us. See below.
(3) Come in and demo your program to the team for 2 hours, and run through a gauntlet of additional technical interviews with 2 to 3 person teams for another 3 hours.
This is a more rigorous interview process than Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon; all places that I have interviewed at before.
How can they expect someone to write this kind of code (see below) for an interview, especially for a company like this that has fallen so far since the original smart board? And for a $120,000/year CAD salary? Insanity.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a real time Chat application
- Secure registration / authentication (using Google or Facebook login, or similar)
- CRUD chat rooms
- Any user join/leave multiple chat rooms; persist preferences to a database
- Store all messages sent/received in a database so that users get their history when they log back in, or can receive messages offline and see them when they log back in
- Real time message delivery using WebSockets
- Must support OVER 10,000 concurrent users, and you need to demonstrate that this works with some kind of load test (did they want me to pay money and spin up a cluster in Google cloud or something? Or did they just want me to increase the number of file handlers per process on my computer and somehow have it scale adequately on my dual core MacBook Air? Insanity.)
- Licensing restrictions to MIT license???? Why would they care? Are they intending on using this code for their production systems after I give it to them?
- Must be scalable, maintainable, testable
If I were scoping this kind of program for a real job, the MVP would be several dev weeks of work, including the planning/design portion. I've never met a single dev that could bang out something like this in a day or two from scratch. It almost seemed like they want you to write a bunch of free code for them to use in one of their internal projects.
I applied online. I interviewed at SMART Technologies
Interview
I received a copy-pasted email asking me to complete an asynchronous interview, asking me to record videos of myself answering a few questions about myself. Pretty humiliating experience considering they completely ghosted me after. If this is how they treat candidates I can only imagine that they don't treat their employees very well.
I applied online. I interviewed at SMART Technologies
Interview
Got invited to a digital interview, very awkward and intrapersonal as you don't get to talk to anyone neither make questions, just record yourself answering about 5 or 6 questions. Afterwards got ghosted and never heard back from them. Makes me wonder if anyone ever got to watch the recorded videos or it is just AI evaluated.
Onsite in-person interview, One interviewer was the team leader, the other was HR person. They asked me if I had any experience in Cloud and web developer, but I did not have these experiences.
Software Developer applicants have rated the interview process at SMART Technologies with 2.5 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 75% positive. To compare, the company-average is 42.9% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Developer roles take an average of 27 days to get hired, when considering 4 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at SMART Technologies overall takes an average of 37 days.
Common stages of the interview process at SMART Technologies as a Software Developer according to 4 Glassdoor interviews include:
Skills test: 19%
Phone interview: 19%
Group panel interview: 19%
One on one interview: 19%
Background check: 13%
Personality test: 6%
Presentation: 6%
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