My Interview Experience at BrowserStack

So in the two previous posts where I talked about How I landed a job at BrowserStack and tried to reason for the things that happened in this post by writing a summary of the book which I had been reading, called Power Of Subconscious Mind.
It’s time to write about my interview experience at BStack ❤️.

For starters, I just have one word to describe which will give you a rough idea of what to expect below. The experience was AWESOME!. I bet that you may have not seen such a process for interviewing candidates for full time roles.
It’s one of it’s kind and you won’t find it anywhere else.

So it’s time for the meat😄. Let’s start.

I was called on for the interview on June 5, 2018.

June 5, 2018: 11 AM

I entered the office and was waiting for the HR contact to meet me and then move for the rest of the planned schedule in the interview.
I liked the open culture that is built here with no restricted cabins, where you can talk about a problem or just say hi! to anyone from Founders to anyone from any teams. I explored the cafe as I had known what BrowserStack had to offer 😸.

Then after some time, I met Senior Software Engineer from one of the teams who was assigned to give me assignments.
So yes, now that I mentioned assignments, lets talk about that!

Assignments:

This is what unique about interviewing at BrowserStack. You won’t find it in any of the BIG4 (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft). The idea is, every candidate that comes for Engineering Interview, is given assignments, duration may vary depending on how complex the problem statement is and what role you are interviewing for, for me, it was of 2 hours each for 2 assignments.

The unique part about assignments:

You are given a detailed problem statement which can be anything, right from building a prototype of some problem or let’s say… a backend implementation of something that has to be up and running and should meet the requirements mentioned. And you are ALLOWED TO RESEARCH, READ DOCUMENTATION ONLINE 😍 while working on it. Found it amazing? I bet it is 😃.
Just evaluating on algorithm and DS is not sufficient (Of course, there is a round on this at BStack) if you want to build stuff at BrowserStack. This way of interviewing, tests whether you can research and solve the problem because as I said in my earlier post, its not the same old app development where things are defined, you google stuff, copy code from stack-overflow etc, what we develop is system software, tweak it the way we need it. So not many code snippets on StackOverflow 😆.Of course, there is a web application running. But you really should know, how to research and work your way up the problem and squash them. Hence, the assignments help to understand whether a candidate has those skills or not.

I was done with my first assignment before lunch and another one after lunch. Submitted the zip of code files for evaluation.

After the second assignment I had one round of Data Structures and Algorithms. Now, I can’t really get into the actual problem statements, that is against the company policy to discuss them on public forums. But make sure you know basics of different data structures and how, when and why to use them in a given problem.

Final chat with Co-Founder and CTO of BrowserStack — Nakul Aggarwal

Well, to be honest, I never had a chance to meet/talk/interview with a multi-million dollar company’s CFOs or CTOs while I was in college.😅
At a first glance, an eminent personality with clear vision for BrowserStack’s future. We had chat on some questions about myself. Some discussion on the work that is going on, discussion with a bird’s eye view on some problems.
In sometime, the discussion was concluded.

And as the fact states, you are average of the 5 people you work or hangout with. So, I truly feel blessed and I am grateful that I got a chance to work with folks who never make me feel that I know everything. And this is, I think, how an individual grows in his/her career.

So that’s it for this post. If you like what I write, you can follow me on Medium. For new readers, I have pledged myself to write summaries on Medium of most widely read books.
I have started this series with writing summary of the Power Of Subconscious Mind.

Few books that are in my pipeline are :

1. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill — link
2. The Monk who sold his Ferrari by Robin Sharma
3. The Dhandho Investor by Mohnish Pabrai
4. Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
5. The Subtle Art of not giving a F*CK by Mark Manson

So I bet that following me won’t be waste of your time 😄. If you got any questions or just need a healthy discussion you can ping me on Twitter or LinkedIN.
Peace ☮️