Flixster Software Engineer interview questions

I applied online and was contacted by the HR team. I had a brief telephonic call with HR to talk about current positions, jobs etc. In a days time, I was informed to come on site for the interview. This was very strange as companies typically call on site after 1-2 rounds of telephonic screening. There was no NDA either!! The on site was broken down into 2 days: 3 on day one and 3 on day two. I was less than impressed with the interview process. Except for 2 rounds of interviews, all of them asked me puzzles or extremely simple questions. In general, interviews can be classified into two groups: extremely algorithms and data structures oriented or background and skillset oriented. This was puzzles based. Puzzles are no measure of anybody's technical skillset and added to that, it was very hard for me to judge the team with puzzles. Additionally, some "key" people heavy emphasized on university and degree. Even when I was made the offer, I was told about my school and that its a competing offer.

Flixster, also known as the people behind the Rotten Tomatoes web site, is a start-up-style company which is actually backed by the considerably larger (and financially stable) Warner Brothers studio. The Flixster recruiter sourced me via my usually quiet & under-noticed careers.stackoverflow.com profile, which was a nice change of pace from usually getting pushed into interviews I don't want to do via pushy headhunters. The company is based on the border of SOMA and Potrero Hill, on Utah Street close to 15th avenue. It's on the fourth floor of a heavily remodeled warehouse-type building. The working space are all tables (no cubes and certainly no offices for regular employees from what I could see) and there looks like there's a bit of room available to grow within the space that they currently have (the company comprises of about 50 employees). There's a big kitchen area by the entrance with a bunch of snacks and a cooler (with just a couple different kinds of soft drinks in there; it may have been I arrived on a day when it wasn't well stocked). In terms of the demographic, everybody seems to be well under the age of 35. Bay Area tech interviews generally fall into two categories: either they examine and ask questions directly relating to the candidate's background and history, or the candidate gets interrogated on their general knowledge of computer science concepts (i.e. algorithms & data structures). Unfortunately Flixster subscribes to the latter approach, at least for the first round of a typical two round on-site interview. The role I was interviewing for was as a mobile software engineer. The first guy I spoke with was a product manager, and he was the only one who had actually taken the time to look at my resume before arriving and he asked questions about my approaches to different development scenarios. The second guy was a front end web guy. His technical question was probably the most time consuming, but he seemed to (grudgingly) accept the algorithms I attempted to draw out. The third guy was a mobile software engineer who kept the friendly banter to a minimum and tried to blast me with a couple algorithm questions (which I've copied down below). Judging from his reactions, I'm guessing he will be the strongest thumbs down against me coming on board to work with the team. In terms of the technical questions, nobody asked me a single darned thing that actually reflected my specialty or background or the potential work I would be doing: the questions were all algorithms. In other words, the kind of candidate your Flixster engineer co-workers are looking for would be a recent computer science grad with an emphasis on algorithms & data structures. The last person I spoke with was the recruiter who sourced me, who was incredibly friendly and all smiles. She apologized for not giving me a proper heads-up on the Flixster style of interviewing (but then again, that's why I was taking notes, to report back here on GlassDoor :-). Out of all the people I spoke with, I was actually very happy with her friendliness -- the week prior to my on-site interview, she invited me to attend Flixster's private screening of a blockbuster film that was opening the next day, and as I departed she gave me an (authentic) movie poster from that screening, which i was really touched and impressed by. It's a pity that I did't pass the first round, but hopefully my experience flunking the interview will help you to pass yours. If my interview notes helped you out, please let me know by voting "yes" on the "Helpful?" question below.