I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Pocket Gems in Feb 2017
Interview
An online assessment was received half an hour after I submitted application. It was a Lytmus coding challenge. After finishing the online assessment, a phone interview was scheduled. Two coding questions were asked in the phone interview.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Find the first occurrence of string Needle in string Haystack.
I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Pocket Gems (Pitts, PA) in Dec 2016
Interview
After finishing the OA, got a call from one engineer to begin the interview. Actually the interviewer seemed to be not familiar with the question given and had a long time explaining the second question. Actually this company gives the OA to everybody and seems to let engineers try to interview as many people as possible to get, experience?
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Pocket Gems (San Mateo, CA) in Feb 2017
Interview
Pocket Gems is very generous with giving interviews. My friend in PocketGems referred me and I received online coding test instantly. I did some preparations for several days.
Before I was going to do the coding test, I found the ESTIMATED time of the test is 1h50min, but the ACTUAL time they gave is 1h15min! I emailed them asking if this is intended. After two days I finally got the response saying "This is a mistake, we fixed it".
Do you believe it? If you believe it, the two-day delay and the mistake are still very unprofessional.
Personally I think setting the time to 1h15min is a way to raise the hiring bar intentionally and sneakily. I don't want to judge people like that, but the thought made me feel uncomfortable.
The coding challenge is not too difficult, but it's not trivial. I made the most things right and I was 90% on the way (Minor bugs prevent my code passing the unit tests). I explained the situation and hoped they gave me a chance for the phone interview, because I heard some people still got phone interviews without finishing the online test before. But the next day, an auto generated decline. Every email during the process was auto-generated except the email "we fixed it". Yeah they are generous with giving interviews, but they are also generous with declining people.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Lymtus challenge, one post below has the exact questions. It's even more difficult than the phone interview questions, since you don't need to pass unit tests in the phone interviews.
You need to parse the text such as time and graph information and then process them. It's tough to get your code 100% right and pass the unit tests.