NewStore Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process was really strange. It took forever to schedule interviews, like a month for the first one and then another month for the second. I had to do this case study, writing user stories, which took me a whole day. They messed up my email twice and even lost my case study, so I had to redo it. What was also weird was I never actually spoke to my future manager. They wouldn't tell me anything about their clients, like how many they have, how big they are, or what size they're targeting. So it's hard to know if people actually like this product, other than they have one client in Asia. It worries me that with all their funding, they're bypassing the usual startup learning curve and building a huge product without much market testing with 140 people. They're great at impressing customers with the tech and mobile app, but do stores and customers actually want and use it?

I applied via a recruiter and the whole thing took about two months. First, there was a quick Skype chat with HR. Then, they sent me a Codility challenge. After I finished that, they set up a 3.5-hour Skype session which was actually three interviews back-to-back. The first was a live coding session focused on implementing common algorithms and discussing their time/space complexity. They're looking for Golang but I used Python since no one there knew it yet. The second interview was a design discussion. The interviewer shared a link to an online tool showing a client-server app design with a database and a third-party payment service. I had to point out its strengths and weaknesses, propose fixes, and talk about the trade-offs. The last interview was with the VP of Engineering and was more about soft skills and things like, "What would my previous employer or colleagues say about me?" I felt good about most of the interviews. But instead of a decision, I got promises of feedback for weeks, and then they just vanished. If they can't even give a decision, why would I want to work with them? Total waste of my time.

Applied on LinkedIn, then the recruiter reached out and arranged the interviews. First up was a 45-minute technical talk with a VP of Engineering, covering general tech topics and my resume. Then, a 3-hour online coding test with 4 relatively easy questions, mainly involving array manipulation and password verification, plus a Python challenge. I got good feedback on that. Round 3 was a 90-minute live coding session with two engineers, focusing on building a pub-sub/event bus system in Go, which the VP said went 'very positive'. After that, a 90-minute software design round with an engineer where I had to improve a sample service, focusing on an event-driven architecture and discussing solution tradeoffs. The final round was 60 minutes with the recruiter and another VP of Engineering, mainly HR and managerial stuff. It was a long process but pretty enjoyable. Sadly, despite positive feedback throughout, I got an auto-generated rejection email. Kind of a bummer, especially for a company that talked so much about employee benefits to not give any real feedback after an 8-hour interview process. Bad form, honestly. Just a heads-up for others interviewing with them.

I applied online and it took a few weeks to hear back, but then things moved fast. I had two Skype interviews with team members. Then I came in for an on site interview, but it was actually three more Skype/video interviews with people in different locations. They told me I was a finalist and might be invited back, but a week later they said they were going in a different direction.