Upside Interview Questions
& Process

Upside's interview process is all about checking out your mobile engineering background, how you own features from start to finish, and your thoughts on architecture, scaling, and performance for a consumer app. They'll test your Kotlin coding with a real-time exercise, dive into system and mobile design stuff like modularization and managing state, and then see how you collaborate, mentor, and solve problems with behavioral questions to make sure you're a good fit for product thinking and team contribution.

I interviewed for about a month and a half. I talked with the recruiter, brand designers, marketing operations specialists, and the SVP of brand. I also did a really long strategy assessment take home project that took a lot of effort, studying, and attention to detail. I tried my best on this assessment because it was interview 4 of 5, and I was told things were going well for me. The recruiter was nice and encouraged me after each interview. But then, within a week of me presenting my strategy assessment perfectly, they decided to cancel the opening to "reassess the needs of the role." It was a total waste of my time for 6 weeks. I feel used.

The hiring process was quite extensive, stretching for nearly two months from the initial recruiter screening to the final decision. I went through eight interviews spread across seven distinct days, interacting with thirteen individuals from various departments and levels, including recruiters, hiring managers, product managers, technical team members, top graders, HR personnel, and other stakeholders. While everyone I encountered was friendly, respectful, and pleasant, I found the extended nature of the process to be concerning. My view is that lengthy hiring processes aren't ideal for any company, often signaling an organizational culture bogged down by indecisiveness, complex systems, and a prevailing mediocrity or unhappiness among its members. I believe it's more beneficial to hire someone who excels in a couple of areas, even if they're weaker in others, rather than someone who's just average across the board, as long processes tend to favor the latter. Relying heavily on committees and group decisions can be a sign of a hesitant culture, where responsibility is diffused to avoid making firm choices. Furthermore, a complex hiring process suggests an equally complicated underlying system and culture, whereas simplicity is highly valued. Ultimately, these long processes are costly for the company and taxing for the candidates. These are my personal opinions, so take them with a grain of salt. My suggestion to the company is to reconsider and modify the process if it doesn't align with its core culture.

The interview started with standard steps. First, a chat with the manager, then a coding challenge with two engineers. These initial stages went well, and I felt good about the people I spoke with. Following that, there was a Topgrading interview. They asked for the names of all my past supervisors and college professors. The interviewer didn't introduce themselves or explain their role at the company before starting this intense questioning. I later learned this person was another engineering manager from a different team, and they are even featured in a company recruiting video about their culture. In my 20+ years of experience, I've never encountered anything like this. After about 15 minutes, I decided to end the interview and withdraw from the process, which is the first time I've ever done that. It turns out this is a method called TORC (threat of reference check), which assumes candidates are dishonest and treats them like criminals during interrogation. This was created by the same people at GE who invented stack ranking and is not typical for software interviews; GE doesn't even use it anymore. Starting a potential relationship with such a negative approach raised serious concerns for me about the company's culture.