Qualia Interview Questions
& Process

I had a phone screen with a recruiter. She asked a few questions and I did most of the talking. She wanted content recorded for AI analysis and the hiring manager to listen. It was a good overview of the role, but the recruiter was new and couldn't answer everything.

It started with a recruiter screening, which was good because they were really open and helped me get ready for what was next. I actually liked this part - usually these calls feel like a waste of time where everyone asks the same questions, but here it felt useful and intentional. Then I had a 1-1 coding session with an engineer where I had to build a small web app. It wasn't too difficult. If you pass that, you go to the onsite, and they mentioned they'd end the interview early if you didn't pass the first technical part. That first technical part had two sections. The first was to finish a small game. This part didn't make much sense to me, given it's not a gaming company, and it didn't seem like a great way to find good candidates. You either know game dev already and can tackle it easily, or you try to treat it like an algorithm problem and might fail. The second section was a type of "hacking" challenge to get into a website. Again, I was unsure how relevant this was to the actual job, as it's not something you'd do regularly. I do appreciate that they didn't ask typical LeetCode questions, but these other problems didn't feel better at assessing real skills - although I have to say the problems were at least engaging to solve. After that, we took a break. I really thought they would stop the interview then, since failing the first part means there's no point in continuing. But for some reason, they didn't, and you end up having two more shorter calls with managers to talk about more general subjects. All in all, the process took way too much of my day without a clear reason.

Very quick interview process - Thursday - 30 min zoom interview with recruiter Monday- 30 minute zoom interview with the customer success director Tuesday- two 30 minute zoom interviews with hiring managers Thursday- Verbal offer

After I scheduled my interview, I read through all the feedback on Glassdoor. I had hoped that people were just upset about not getting an offer, but I found all the feedback on here to be really accurate. Others have stated that some of the problems are building a weather app, completing a snake game, building a piano application, and hacking a website. There are now new problems such as completing a Brick Out game (draw the paddle and ball, animate the ball, do collision detection), and building a stock ticker application (use a given library to search, display, and update stocks). There is nothing complicated about these problems, they seem to just be looking at how fast you can complete them. Every coding exercise has bonus tasks, and you will have to complete all of them to get an offer. The interviewers acted like they did not want to be there. They asked questions to start their rounds, but didn't seem to care what I said, often trying to cut my answer short, and never asking follow-up questions. Every interviewer I had tried to cut their round short, and not give me the full time to ask questions. They were not good at answering questions, and I had one interviewer who would only give a one sentence answer no matter what I asked. Most interviewers did not pay attention to what I was doing. I could hear them typing on their keyboard, and doing other work, as I worked through the problems. Even when I completed the problem, I was just ignored, and the interview continued until the 45 minute timer was up for the problem. I read on here that if they don't like what you did in an interview round, they won't proceed to the next. I kept hoping they would cut off my interview, but they never did. The way they schedule the interview consumes your whole day. There are three technical rounds, and a behavioral round, but they put long "breaks" in between. I assume this is to accomodate their employees with scheduling, but it really wastes the candidate's time. I wish they were up-front about their technology stack, especially having asked the recruiter before the interview. It's disappointing to be going through an interview, and hear everyone talking about working with MeteorJS. None of my interviewers talked about wanting someone who could lead, mentor, or design applications, they just wanted someone who could crank out code with their tech stack. There was not even a design round in the interview. This is not a company I would recommend to anyone.