Shapeways Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

This was a 30-minute phone screen that I found on a popular dev hiring site. They talked a lot about their needs and the role itself, so there wasn't really any time for me to ask questions. It was clear they're looking for someone with 5+ years of PHP experience, but also 3+ years of NodeJS and full-stack skills to make onboarding smoother and allow for future flexibility. They were very upfront about what they wanted and didn't give much info when I asked about turnover or if their recent angel funding would mean they'd hire more people after a long time with no hiring. It sounds like their PHP tech from 5+ years ago is starting to shift towards NodeJS services, so they need someone senior who knows both to handle the migration solo. They seem to have a small team (maybe 2-3 engineers) for the immediate tasks, even though they have many more people elsewhere.

You have two days to program an algorithm to sort through 1000 users' list of musical artist along with a HTML/CSS/YUI javascript exercise. I saw a few other people's answers on github, but they were either incomplete or had mistakes. It doesn't seem like any of them got hired. If they don't like your answers, you won't get any feedback, so unless you can make a much better program than what's on github, don't waste two days.

The interview process started with a take-home test, followed by a phone interview, and concluded with either an in-person interview or a Skype interview. The skills test was unexpected as it covered HTML. My advice to management is to be more transparent in job postings to avoid wasting applicants' time.