Puddle Interview Experience foe SDE Intern (Off-Campus)

My interview experience for Puddle (for SDE Intern). It was an off-campus application and I applied for this job at https://wellfound.com/. The overall hiring process involved two rounds:

1. Home assignment
2. Technical + HR interview

Home Assignment

First of all, I was given a home assignment to complete in 2 days. I was supposed to build a contact app with OTP SMS-sending functionality. Expected functionalities:

• The main screen should have two tabs.
• First tab: It contains a list of contacts (maybe fake contacts). Upon clicking on each contact, it should show Name, Phone number and a button to send OTP which when clicked should send the OTP to the phone number.
• Second tab: It should show the list of sent messages.
• User experience includes responsiveness, input validation, etc.

Tech stack used: MERN stack and free Twilio service for sending SMS.

Submission of the project included source code and live site for testing.

Technical + HR interview

The second round was an interview that involved both Technical and HR. It was 1 hour long interview. The interviewer made me very comfortable. There was no language barrier and I was allowed to talk in Hindi as well. It started with a ‘Tell me about yourself’ question. Then, the interviewer asked me to rate myself in JavaScript, React.js, and Nodejs out of 5. Some other questions in the interview were as follows:

• Some basic JavaScript questions like callbacks, promises, event loops, etc.
• Then some hands-on coding on the JS bin. The questions were on map, filter, and reduce.
• In React.js, questions on hooks were asked like below:
• What are hooks?
• Explain useState and useEffect hooks.
• How to do clean up in useEffect?
• What is Virtual Dom?
• Difference between local-storage and session-storage.
• What is CORS?
• Basics of redux like reducer, actions, store.

Out of all the above questions, some were from assignments also.

HR round was very short (about 15 mins). It was taken by the founder of Puddle who joined after some time in call. The purpose of this round was to test problem-solving and communication skills. One of the questions was “How many trees are there in your city?”. I was supposed to tell the approach to solve the problem and not the exact number as no one knows the answer.

Some tips

Make yourself comfortable in the interview process. If you are stuck at any point, then you can ask the interviewer to provide some hints. I was allowed to use Google also. But try not to search everything on Google because fighting with the question is more what is expected from you. In HR interview, try to understand the intention behind the question rather than just directly giving the answer.