Collage.com interview questions

I interviewed with a person at the company 1:1. He had me ask questions about Collage but didn't really ask me questions. We then jumped into a 30 min coding session. This part of the interview process was collaborative and I enjoyed the task we accomplished. About a week later I received a take home assignment that was supposed to take 3-4 hours. I thought the questions that I was asked to solve were interesting, but the time frame of 3-4 hours wasn't very accurate for what needed to be done. The code they gave was really messy, and they said to make changes I would suggest in a peer review and had about 3 stories worth of new functionality to implement. The thing that really was frustrating was how little communication occurred in the second part. I received the assignment and had a lot of questions about their expectations (as any engineer would if a PO gave them 3 stories to implement). I sent several emails but didn't hear back until the next day (after I had submitted) and didn't have any other line of communication. I was then sent a follow up email with questions about my implementation. I answered them to the best of my understanding of what they were looking for, but for being a remote company I don't think email only communication is good at all. They said they conduct their stand ups over email so that was a big red flag for me going in and this stage just confirmed my fear of how communicating would go. Another concern I have is the time estimation process - the team lead and PO estimate all stories. Based on the size of the take home assignment and the estimation that the first task would take 10-20 min (it didn't) and the second task 3-4 hours (more like 6 with all of the refactoring) I was left with the impression that this would not be a good place to work. All in all I enjoyed the first interview and the problems were interesting and I learned some things as I went, but I thought the second part would have gone much better if I had been able to talk with my interviewer about what the expectations were of the take home assignment.

I went through several stages of interviews with Collage.com. #1 - After applying online, 1 hour phone interview with engineer. Nothing too stressful. Got to ask lots of questions about the work environment. #2 - Take-home assignment that is supposed to take 4 hours. I think a 4 hour project is pretty disrespectful of my time, but I was very interested in the role and I thought I could knock it out of the park. Was asked to extend a simple HTML / JavaScript page to improve functionality. #3 - Received a follow-up from an engineer regarding my solution. Spent 30-45 minutes reviewing the work I had completed more than a week earlier and writing up responses. #4 - Another 1 hour interview with an engineer. We talked about what kinds of technical challenges I have solved. No trivia questions, which was nice, but definitely got into some detail. #5 - 1 hour interview with founder. Discussed my work background and he was particularly interested in my relationship with product management. At the end of the interview, he asked when I would be looking to start the job. From the day I submitted my application to the day I received a rejection letter was roughly 4 weeks. I spent 9 hours in total, which does not include any interview prep work I did.