I applied online and shortly after (day or two) received an email asking to set up an initial phone call. This was a basic phone screen, ask about my background, and what the interview process is like. Next was a more in-depth technical screen with a lead engineer. It was not overly difficult, nor were the questions algos/DS. I had to go through several past projects and explain in depth what I did to solve these issues, etc. The lead engineer was very nice on the phone and pleasant to speak to. After this I had to complete an "iOS Coding Challenge". You are essentially given a basic spec, and you implement it. On the phone I asked a bit about what the expectations were for the project, since I had seen in prior reviews people felt this was unclear. I was assured that they instructions were clear and it was about seeing how I solved the problem versus a pixel-perfect "ready to ship" app. The estimated time for the project is 4-6 hours. This is pretty long for coding challenges I have done in the past. It's a relatively simple spec, but I spent a lot of time refactoring, and trying to give it my best (I completed it as if I was going to put it up for code review, so I considered what I would need in order to pass a code review internally). After I sent the code in, I was told I would come onsite next. Onsite was a "half" day in their SF office. The office itself is super nice and people were very friendly. There were a variety of technical and non technical interviews including one with a cofounder, but I had prepared quite a bit (knew my resume inside and out, studied design, studied some basic algos/ds) and felt like it went really well. We also had lunch onsite and while it is not an explicit interview, you should still be prepared for asking some questions about yourself/what your career goals are, etc. After the onsite, I soon found out I had received an offer. I don't have too many bad things to say about the entire process, maybe the food choice onsite was not the best for having a conversation :P it was a bit messy, but overall people were very pleasant, I enjoyed the coding project, and I always felt informed about where we were in the process.

The recruiter lady was very nice, and I feel bad even going out of my way here to leave a negative review, but in this case I thought I could maybe help someone else save their valuable time. Throughout my career working as an iOS developer, I've interviewed at numerous companies of various different sizes, and never been asked to do a relatively detailed project in a short amount of time just to have it torn to shreds like this. I took hours out of my day in-between interviewing with other companies and jumping on airplanes just to complete CMB's project. They give you a very vague description of how they want it completed (like it's not explicit whether you are encouraged to use third-party libraries or not), and a mockup. I - rather quickly I might add - put together an app that functioned exactly as they wanted and how it appeared in the mockup, I took a quick look over my code, and sent it over. I got a call later with feedback like "inconsistent line spacing" like seriously? I guess in a few instances I put an extra space in-between my method declarations. They criticized one dumb little mistake I made, where I force-unwrapped an optional that I had already conditionally guarded against, okay THAT I understand, that's a valid criticism, but IMO not a reason to turn someone down unless it's happening all over the place. Other than that the rest of the feedback I received were things like how I left some print statements in my code from debugging, and also there were some some complier warnings due to a UIBezierPath I made, and forgot to call setNeedsDisplay() - little mistakes that can easily go overlooked while doing a quick coding project challenge. Look, I appreciate even receiving feedback, you don't always get that, and like I said the recruiter was very professional and friendly, but I think their engineers evaluating these projects are being WAY too critical. I've been on the other end of this, and never seen someone scrutinized over such minute details. Mistakes anyone who's busy and doesn't have endless time to perfect a coding challenge could make. And this isn't just me being bitter about being rejected, I have other opportunities lined up, but I've been told at previous jobs that I actually won the job due to my attention to detail and tenacity when it came to the coding challenge given. I get that everyone wants to hire someone who will deliver production-quality code all the time, but it's not realistic to expect 100% perfectly structured code from an interview-project especially when someone has very limited time. Little mistakes will typically be made. Especially when hiring in such a competitive market, you have to realize that a lot of candidates are going to have multiple interviews lined up, multiple projects their working on simultaneously, and in my case, flying to and from outside states to interview with different companies. I guess maybe they have the luxury to be really picky and demand perfection, I don't know, but I would say keep this all in mind before you decide to spend hours of your time completing a project just so some other developer can rip it to shreds.