Lab49 Interview Questions
& Process

So I had this super disappointing experience. I went through four rounds of interviews and they verbally told me I got the job. I trusted them and even turned down another offer. Then, after 15 days of no contact, they suddenly told me my profile was 'on hold.' They gave no explanation, took no responsibility, and offered no apology for the delay or how it messed up my career plans. It really shows a lack of professionalism and empathy for candidates. It makes me wonder how they treat their employees if this is how they handle hiring. I'd tell future candidates to be careful and not rely on anything they say verbally.

I did two tech interviews at Lab49. The first one was pretty standard and went fine, with some general questions about data structures and a coding challenge similar to LeetCode. The interviewer was engaged and responsive. The second round, however, was way different. I got a codebase that was only partly done and had to use multithreading to implement an interface. After I got the task, the interviewer just seemed to check out and started doing other things. I had to ask my clarifying questions over and over to get his attention, and even then, he took a while to get back into it before answering. At one point, he even gave me wrong info, which I only figured out later when I was coding. All in all, the lack of focus and professionalism in that second round felt really disrespectful and left a bad taste.

The interview kicked off with a recruiter chat that went smoothly. The recruiter was pleasant and to the point. Then, the technical round felt a bit off. It was just one interviewer, no one else, no recording, no oversight. It was mainly about pair-programming in Java. What really caught me by surprise was that the most crucial technology was only touched upon with a single question, which seemed pretty shallow. No other questions came up about this tech or other testing/automation areas. It was heavily focused on Java programming. The interviewer also didn't seem very interested in my past work, what I did, or the challenges I faced. No soft skill or problem-solving questions were asked either. This technical interview was basically just a long pair-programming session.

I was first contacted by an in-house recruiter. The whole thing took about 5 days. I interviewed at Lab49 in Washington, DC back in December 2015. It started with an initial multiple-choice interview with the internal recruiter, which was more about weeding out unqualified candidates than actual hard questions. After that, I had an online/phone interview with a developer using CoderPad. They gave me a program outline and I had to fill in a missing part. I did make some mistakes while coding, but I ran the code, identified the issues, and fixed them while they kept me talking about my debugging process. Then, they added more requirements, and I updated the program accordingly. It felt like a good phone screen, and I even recommended CoderPad to my previous employer. I liked that they had a pre-built program with tests I could run anytime. It felt more like collaborating on development than an interview. The in-person part in DC lasted about four hours with five different people. The first two parts were technical, both using CoderPad again. The first involved implementing an algorithm in JavaScript with some sample code, which I didn't know initially but they explained. I had one problem during development but debugged it quickly. The interviewer found my solution unusual and asked how it worked without 'setTimeout', which I explained in detail, also asking about other methods. This also felt like pair-programming. The second technical interview was more of a Q&A, touched on my resume a bit, and involved another short CoderPad session with specific questions I can't recall now. The third interview was with my potential boss (more of a lead, actually), and it was a more typical management-style interview. Finally, I spoke with HR who mainly discussed company and office details and logistics. A bit of a surprise was how secretive the company is about their business, I couldn't get many details about their work or clients. However, I was satisfied that the people I met seemed great, and I felt I'd be happy working with them. I got an offer the very next day. HR sent an email with answers to some remaining questions, and I accepted the offer the same day.