Bob Demo
San Francisco or Seattle
Full-stack
By email at bob@thisisnotarealwebsite.org
Brief description
Bob is a particularly mathematical engineer who began his career in academia before pivoting to complex algorithmic problems five years ago. His most recent role was with logistics startup Promontory, which optimizes trucking routes and shift changes to reduce costs in the trucking industry. He was a tech lead there on their routing team, working on computationally-difficult optimization problems.
Bob's performance on our interview was heavy on deep CS knowledge (as you'd expect from his deep mathematicial background) and system design (befitting a long-time tech lead). He's a little rustier on practical coding, although that section was still not actively bad, just a little on the slower side than we'd like for a recommendation on that basis alone.
What they're looking for
Bob wants to work more closely with users in his next role. He's spent a lot of time at the back of the house working on more siloed problems, but he feels like he rarely got to see or feel the impact of his work at Promontory, and he'd like to do more of that in his next role. He's also particularly interested in teams working on public-good problems like social services or charitable work, and would prefer to avoid Rails-based codebases if possible (though he stresses that this is not a hard requirement).
Interview results
If you're new to our interview, here's what you need to know:
It's a 90 minute call with one of our senior engineers. (Here's what's on it.)
Green scores = up to the bar of early-stage silicon valley startups (this is a high bar).
Any green score is a recommendation for that area.
A "good" score is approximately 90th percentile.
A "great" score is approximately 95th percentile.
An "exceptional" score (extremely rare) is approximately 99th+ percentile.
Remember that if someone appears here at all, we recommend them.
Overall:
Great
Section scores:
Timed coding
Not quite
Good quality, but slower pace. This is not unusual for engineers who haven't been writing a lot of hands-on code recently, and this section was by no means bad, just a bit below the bar.
Concepts - CS/Algos
Great
Excellent, bordering on exceptional. Deep knowledge both academic and applied, and he can talk about how the two differ (for example, one algorithm being asymptotically faster but slower in practice).
...Full-stack web
Good
Solid professional competence that you'd expect of someone with a startup background. Better on the back-end than the front, but both are good.
...Low-level & security
Not quite
The details of hardware and security aren't his focus, although he has the basics.
Architecture
Great
He's been a tech lead for quite some time, and it shows. He had no trouble with the basic/low-scale version of the problem, could talk about trade-offs both technical and operational, and had clear and well-justified opinions. The scaling section was slightly weaker, but still pretty strong; he could handle systems up to middling scale from what he knows and gave the impression he could figure out higher-scale ones fine.
Technical communication
Great
Clear, well-structured, and technically-precise. He's particularly good at modulating his vocabulary between precision and accessibility, and made sure to check in to be sure our interviewer was following the technical vocabulary.
