Round 1: Introductory interview
In this round, they basically explained what their company was all about, what they do and what I will be doing:
- They told me that they were basically a startup who started in 2015 with the aim of creating creative justice.
- Their focus was to give writers a platform to share their work. They even help writers publish books and e-books.
- Also, they wanted to add multiple languages so as to attract great diversity of readers.
- He also mentioned about their goal to reach 2 million users in another year. Currently they had ~460, 000 users.
- Then, he mentioned about their team size.
- Then, he mentioned about the technologies they used.
Later, they asked me about myself:
- Describe yourself
- What is your current experience? Since, I had worked with C++, he asked why I wanted to shift to Web and what was my motivation for that?
- Are you comfortable with Web technologies. I said I had good hands-on experience with basic web technologies.
- They used NoSQL, so he asked me if I knew it. I said no since I have never worked with it.
Finally, he told me that he will give an assignment to work on based on which they will do the selection.
Round 2: Assignment
- This was a very big assignment. It was basically a design assignment of the complete website (or web app).
- The description was not up to the mark; there were very few instructions and most of it I had to do as per the screenshots they had given. It was a long description of about ~11 – 15 pages which mostly contained screenshots.
- They gave me some images to put in the website, but it wasn’t a complete set of images, so I had a bit of difficulty in working with it. Also, some of the images didn’t even had proper names, so I had to open each image to see if that was the one I wanted.
- I was supposed to use HTML, CSS, Javascript and JQuery.
- The assignment contained designing a website (mobile view) with two pages.
- The design was similar to Facebook or Instagram in which people posted content like a post, quotes, music, or simple discussion about a topic. The post was to be designed in a card-format. Each card had certain common elements like Follow, Like, Share buttons, Comments section, Bookmark, Statistics like no. of likes, shares and comments, images, tags etc.
- The music card was a bit difficult because it required custom design, I tried it out in a separate test file, but couldn’t do it completely.
- The second page was a Recommended section in which for each category there were recommendations. Recommendations had card format but some of them overflowed in the horizontal direction.
- I also had to manually create dummy images in MS Paint so as to enter it in the posts since they had not provided with any images to put in the post.
- I thought I just had to create sample design for them so that they can check whether I had the capability to design websites. I created dummy posts of each category as per the requirement.
After a week, I had to send an email to them to ask about any updates regarding the assignment. They said they won’t be going forward with my application. I was shocked, because I had worked so hard on the assignment for an entire week. I asked them in another mail for any feedback on the assignment, they said it wasn’t what they expected (or wanted).
Positive thing with this interview was that, I got to learn some things about Web technologies which I didn’t knew, for example, working with flex layout. Also, about basics of how to design a custom audio player.