ZapLabs Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process was pretty fast and easy. I applied, and a recruiter called me the next day to set up an initial ~15 min chat. That was just to go over the company and role and see if it felt right for both of us. A couple days later, the recruiter called again to schedule a technical interview over Google Hangouts with two devs. It lasted about an hour. We spent the first 10-15 mins on general JS and CSS stuff. Then, they gave me an image and asked me to build a basic page layout with HTML, CSS, and JS in CodePen within 10-15 mins. After that, they showed me a nested JSON object from an API and asked me to write code to map keys from one object to values in another, also taking about 15 mins. The devs were nice and helpful, explaining things when I asked. Then, I got a call to set up an on-site interview for later that week. It was about 4 hours long and had a few parts. First, two front-end engineers asked more JS/CSS questions (like using vanilla JS for event listeners, event delegation, AJAX/fetch) and gave me two code snippets to predict the output, including ones with setTimeout and variable scope issues. The rest of the interviews were non-technical chats with people from product, QA, and design. I got a call with a job offer a few days later after a holiday weekend, and I took it.

The interview process was pretty standard. First, there was a Skype interview where I was asked two coding questions. Then, I had an onsite interview with nine people. Most of the interviewers were friendly, but one was very rude and unprofessional. She gave me a linked list problem to solve on a whiteboard. After a few minutes, she started talking to her colleague, which was very disturbing. She didn't understand the code and wouldn't let me explain. At the end, when she asked if I had any questions, I asked about new products, and she responded rudely, implying it was a strange question and that I had no respect for the company.

Had a phone call with the recruiter, then a one-hour technical interview. The technical interview had some basic JS and CSS questions and shared-screen coding challenges. The technical interview was pretty easy, like a fizz-buzz level. A week later, I got rejected, they said I missed a question, but I don't remember missing anything or the interviewer mentioning it. It felt like a waste of time, with seemingly random judgments from subpar engineers asking really basic questions to check if you're a 'real' engineer.

Applied and got a quick call from a recruiter. That went well so I had a follow up call with the hiring manager. Then I was invited for an on-site with 4 people from different departments. Bad part was towards the end, I was supposed to meet with the hiring manager but the recruiter said he was unavailable and apologized for the screw-up. Big red flag and wasted my time preparing and traveling. Never heard back from them after the interview. Good thing I found a better job shortly after.