Chegg Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process had 2 interviewers. One was supposed to be a senior technical interviewer but was completely silent. The other was a junior with only 1 year of experience who was clearly just reading questions from Google. They expect interviews like top tech companies but their budget for compensation is not even a quarter of that. By focusing only on DSA and System Design, they are missing out on good developers who have actual experience solving real-world problems.

The first step was a chat with the hiring manager. About half of it was typical phone screen stuff and the other half was front-end trivia. I wasn't told there'd be technical questions on the phone screen, so it felt like a surprise attack. The questions they asked weren't a great measure of a developer's abilities. I don't think anyone would have what they asked memorized – it's totally the kind of thing you'd look up on the job. Then, I had to pick between a live, one-hour coding challenge focusing on algorithms with a team member OR a take-home assessment. When they explained the options, the hiring manager really pushed for the take-home, saying it 'was the easier of the two' and that they use it as a 'foundation for the onsite.' I chose the take-home. Unsurprisingly, the four-hour estimate was way off from how long it actually took to finish the task. The objective was to build a frontend React app using Redux for managing state. The assignment specified the tech stack. In the end, the assignment took me about two days to complete all the requirements. After I submitted the code challenge, the hiring manager said they'd let me know about the next steps. As you can probably guess, they never did. No feedback either. All in all, a pretty awful interview experience. My advice is not to spend too much time on the take-home and just go for the live coding challenge instead.

I had two 1-hour phone interviews with management. The onsite was meeting with about six managers and some individual contributors. It was a pretty standard process, though things felt a bit rushed because it was during the busy season, and some interviewers ended our chats quickly. Be ready for whiteboard exercises for process or code. The culture feels like a typical startup. The management team is really impressive; they're basically leaders in their Silicon Valley industry segment.