Prezi Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process began with a screening call from HR. This was followed by a technical screen with an interviewer, which included a simple coding challenge. Then, there were two more technical interviews: one focused on frontend and another on backend, both featuring easy coding exercises. A behavioral interview was also part of the process. All the interviewers were very friendly and focused on how I approached problems rather than exact recall of programming language methods. It was one of the best interview processes I've encountered. However, the experience was soured by the final offer, which was significantly lower than initially discussed, making it a waste of time for everyone involved. The stated reason was a management decision to change salary computations during my interview process, which felt like strange timing and wasn't very professional.

The hiring process is about 4 steps long: First a phone interview, then an online test, after that a personal meeting and finally a test week. I want to talk about the online test, I really hate online tests, IQ tests and basically any kind of tests. It's super frustrating for me to do this for an hour: check 90 degree rotated parts of images to find out which matches vertically and horizontally, or to find out how much the increment increments between two adjacent numbers in a row. I'm a smart person, and I can seat 10 hours without a glass of water if I'm fixing a bug, but I don't wanna spend my time to solve pointless puzzles. I am ready to get out of my comfort zone: I am ready to design complex systems, write lotsa code, learn new things, but I don't want to see these puzzles. So, I can say, the online test at Prezi is near OPTIMAL. There were two programming task to be solve online: - Write a function (any language, C matches best), which inverts bits in an integer, but not leading zeros: it's 10 lines of code, 10 minutes to write and polish, if you ever written something in ASM, you can do it. - Write a function, which... err... I don't remember, finds the pair in an array, which have average distance... or similar. It's about walking through an array and collect info, select ones, which matches the criteria, then pick the best one. It's also 10 lines of code (I prefer PHP for these kind of tasks because of autovivification). After programming tasks, three question follows, kind of IQ-test questions (the sum of the age of the two brother is X, and Y years later the difference will be X/Z), which, as I said, I hate, but there were only 3 of it. I've tried other companies, one of them have a 5-page C/C++ test, including question: "what does it mean: *************p" (srsly, 10 stars), and there were 5(!) programming tasks with heavy algorhythms - after 2 hour of continous writing I got angry and bored, and escaped. Programming on paper. Is it 1969 or what? Bottom line: the online test at Prezi is optimal.

The whole thing took me months. First, a super chill HR interview. Then, a HackerRank test on algorithms, which was tricky with the site acting up, but I passed. Next, a Skype call with the team and project lead, focusing on new tech, and they threw in a small coding task. They liked me and sent me another programming task, to build a whole app with tests, which I also passed. Finally, I got flown to Hungary for the onsite part. The offices were great and the people cool, mostly young. I had another coding task and a presentation to prepare about the process. I didn't make it in the end, but it was a good experience overall.