Spiceworks Ziff Davis Software Engineer interview questions

One phone screen for personality evaluation, followed by an online coding challenge that took 1-2 hours to complete, to be written in any language. In person interviews were scheduled after that the first was coming in just for two interviews, about 45 minutes each from two different software engineers, one having the title of Senior Engineer. After these two, I was called back for another round of interviews with 5 people (also 45 minutes each), with lunch in the middle of the day. This day consisted also of Developer interviews as well as two interviews from Founders. For the lunch, I joined two other developers as they went to lunch off-site and they answered any and all questions about the company, with elaboration on their own experiences thus far. The general interview format was a) meet person, b) person had copy of my resume and asked questions to ask about previous work, b) brief chatting about my thoughts on the company, what my aspirations are, either by joining or in general, c) technical interview question chosen by the interviewer that I would solve on the whiteboard. Usually they would answer any questions about the problem as I solved it, and felt very encouraging. However, when interviewed by the founders, they left the room as I solved the question so I wouldn't feel pressured by them watching me. I thought each interviewer's question was very easy to understand, and the few questions I did ask were clarified easily. They didn't seem to be looking for any particular answer, but rather how I went about solving the problem, and sometimes casually asking if I could improve my code, or offering a reason to go about it a different way if it looked like my code was ignoring certain possible inputs. I felt relatively relaxed throughout the whole thing, despite my desire to do my best, and I'll admit -- after one founder offered an alternative way to go about his problem, I spent the next week thinking that I had screwed it up completely (this was not the case, but anxiety sometimes gets the better of you). 10/10 would interview again.

Initially gave my resume to a recruiter at my school’s career fair and was told about the company, their culture, and the technology they use. Got a call back 3.5 weeks later asking if I was available for an on-campus interview with the CTO in just a couple of days. He was nice and asked about a thing or two on my resume then gave me a coding challenge on paper. After I came up with a solution, he discussed my answer and other possible ones then gave me time for a question or two. This is something I noticed and liked about all of their technical interviews – each interviewer gave feedback about my answers, either along the way or when I was done, and made it feel more collaborative. It took them a little over a month to get back to me about moving forward. A week after that, I had a phone interview with a lead developer. He was friendly, laid-back, and I enjoyed the interview a good deal. Instead of focusing on my resume, he asked me a number of technical questions to gauge my experience. Many of them I didn’t know, but he told me that was ok and to guess what I thought the answer was anyways. After each one, we discussed the answer and he elaborated on why he chose to ask that question. Then we did a collaborative coding question on a live text editor site (similar to Google Docs). Along the way, he pointed out what I might want to think about and discussed my solution to the problem in an open and friendly manner. I then got an email back after a few days to schedule an on-site at their HQ in Austin. The location of their office was a bit of a drive from downtown Austin and not much around which was probably the only negative of my time there. Anyways, the on-site consisted of four technical interviews, lunch (not really an interview), and the potential of meeting with the CEO and another higher-up. I say potential because that is what I kept being told, but it definitely seemed like the last two interviews were only for people who passed the other ones that day. The technical interviews were similar to the previous ones except with a whiteboard this time. And after those, I met with the VP of Products and the CEO. Everyone I met there was amicable, down to earth, and willing to talk openly about the company. The whole experience at their office was relaxed and it all seemed to click. I received an offer a couple of days later which I negotiated up a bit and decided to accept based on my experience with the people. Overall, I got the impression that culture is something everyone values deeply and they work hard to maintain a good and positive atmosphere. Everybody was exceptionally friendly and it was easy to tell they were on top of their game. The CEO discussed with me why he co-founded the company and had an honest conversation about the growth the company is currently experiencing and what that means going forward. I came away from it all very impressed to say the least.