kevinoconnor7

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Not really. If you're in the very rare situation where you need to diagnose a bug in long-since dead code, you can just view repository synced to where the version was cut.

kevinoconnor7

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Thanks for calling this out: you're right. I don't think I highlighted properly what I actually wanted to highlight.

I more wanted to emphasize my view as a bystander at a very hectic point of their growth, not actually complain about the experience. It was an interesting experience to me, not a negative one.

I have no hard feelings about it and I'm sure things got sorted out. I certainly have no negative views of any individual I dealt with.

kevinoconnor7

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

oops! I rotated my private key a couple years back and never updated that. Fixed!

kevinoconnor7

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Overall I don't think the total amount was excessive, or maybe just slightly. My experience has always been been technical phone screen or homework problem before onsite, but not both.

The real issue was how chaotic the process was. I had started out talking to an engineer that had picked up my application, but was handed off to recruiter only after the homework portion was done (said recruiter even mentioned that they had just been hired). The two technical phone screens also were two discrete steps (i.e. the second was only scheduled after the success of the first).

That was really the issue: neither I nor them knew how many more steps there were. It wasn't helped by having long periods of radio silence between each step either. But it was painfully obvious that they were scrambling to figure out how to scale their processes, so much so that it still stands out to me 6+ years later.

kevinoconnor7

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

> How much time does it typically take (or should take) to complete a 'homework' project?

I was still in college at the time but I maybe spent 5-10 hours over the course of a week or so. I do remember it took a very long time for them to respond after I had sent it in though. I believe the project was to implement a basic web crawler in Go.

> Now yes I do understand programming is not the same but my point still stands why so many chefs in the kitchen?

After the homework problem I think that's where they were defining the process as they went. They seemed to be growing quite a bit at the time (IIRC when I was onsite they had just rented two more floors of office space) and I had bounced between a few contacts that were brand new to the company. The real struggle is that I never knew how many more steps were to come, and I'm not sure they knew either.

Though after the onsite they e-mailed me almost immediately to setup the call with Ben so I think everything had gone well up to that point. I don't think the call with Ben went poorly so my best guess is that they went with someone that had experience rather than a new grad.

FWIW I'm not actually bitter about this. I just found it to be an interesting snapshot of a particularly chaotic point in the company's history.

kevinoconnor7

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I remember interviewing with DO back in late 2014 and it was nuts! The entire interview process took ~3 months and it was clear that they were defining the process as they went. The entire process was basically:

  1. initial call with recruiter
  2. homework project
  3. call with engineer to discuss said homework project
  4. two phone screens with engineers
  5. onsite interview with 6 engineers

Finally I had was at the final step which was a call with Ben who was really interesting to talking to as we shared the sysadmin background.

They we going through some pretty crazy growth at the time so I forgave a lot of disorganization in the interview process. Unfortunately I didn't end up getting the role but I'm glad to have had that experience; it was definitely an interesting point in DigitalOcean's history.

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