Chili Piper Frontend Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process at Chili Piper can be long, but the time between each step is quick. For this role, the questions were very direct.

I hoped they would have shared the salary range upfront, or at least before the first technical interview. I ended up having to share my salary expectations midway through. After that, I interviewed with the CTO and then the co-founder. I also had a salary negotiation with an HR person. They gave me a few days to resign from my current job, but instead of formal paperwork, they offered me a 30% pay cut and said they'd 'try to make it work.' It felt like a really scummy way to treat potential employees, especially since front-end roles are in high demand and I could have secured a fair rate elsewhere. I dropped other opportunities because I didn't expect them to backtrack on their initial offer. While a deal falling through isn't a huge issue for a technical person, it reflects on the company's integrity and how they might treat colleagues. I'd advise staying away.

I had to finish a HackerRank test with two questions. The first was a React form with validation, which was pretty easy. The issue was that when I tried to run their boilerplate code locally, it didn't work and got stuck in some kind of loop. So, I tried to do it online, but the code was really bad. It was still using class components, had a weird link inside a div to make a button, and even after running the tests, I couldn't see the interface or use logs to check debug variables. By the time I got to the second test, a matrix path algorithm, it was too late, and the time ran out while I was halfway through solving it. I wasted a lot of time fixing their errors and trying to figure out their code. It was a simple React component, so why make the code so complex? If their codebase is like this, I think they need to improve their developers and start writing tests for modern code, not old legacy stuff.