My personal experience as a candidate during The Plum Guide interview
Hello 👋
My name is Arthur Tsvettsih, and I am a mid-level full-stack engineer here at The Plum Guide. I joined just over six months ago, and I thought it was worth sharing my experience as a candidate applying for a software engineering role here.
Interview experience at other companies 😰
Since finishing university, I have worked at three different companies. Before getting an offer from The Plum Guide, I had applied and interviewed at tens of companies. However, to keep this blog post fair, I will only count face-to-face interviews, which I have had around 15.
From my experience, I can group interviews into several groups:
- Whiteboarding ⬜ — coding on a whiteboard. It generally includes problems that can be solved in a few lines of code. I am not a huge fan of these, as some interviewers evaluate your syntax knowledge too much — let’s be honest, we all google how to declare an array every now and then 👀
- Pair programming 💻 — coding on a laptop while being the driver. Most of these have asked me to implement a class and then write some tests. This type of interview is alright, but I believe it doesn’t show the interviewer more than that the developer knows the basics, which could be enough in some cases.
- Algorithms 📈 — coming up with short and concise code that solves an algorithmic problem. This is my least favourite type of interview, as I believe they are like mathematical problems in school — the more you solve them, the higher your chances that you’ve solved a similar problem before, and know-how to tackle this one. I don’t think they tell the interviewer as much as other types of interviews.
- Homework 📖 — doing a project at home and then discussing it. These can be okay, but they are hard to justify. These projects generally take longer than an hour, and you don’t get to talk to the interviewer to understand what areas they want you to focus on.
- Informal Chat 💬 — talking about development in general. I believe these are the best kind of interviews as they show that the developer knows more than just the syntax and has a genuine interest in tech. Keeping it informal helps make the candidate feel like you want to get to know them more, not just from a technical level. Unfortunately, this quite rare.
The Plum Guide Interview 🙌
At the time of writing this post, a back-end developer interview consists of a few stages:
- Phone screening (15 mins)
- Technical face-to-face (60 mins)
- Cultural (45 mins)
For the face-to-face interview, The Plum Guide was more than happy to work around my current work schedule and arranged for me to come in and do the interview after I finished work. When I arrived at The Plum Guide office, I instantly felt very welcome, and I could already tell that this would be a great place to work just by the atmosphere in the office. The engineers doing the interview came over and greeted me, offered me a drink, and asked if I needed anything else before heading into the meeting room.
The interview started with Faesel and Adrià giving me a short overview of the company and it’s history, before diving into the tech stack and how the codebase is currently evolving. In short, The Plum Guide started as a monolithic .NET MVC application, and in the last few years, the team has begun breaking it down into microservices and micro-frontends. They have even done a talk explained how and why they have adopted a “vertical micro-frontend” approach using React.
Face-To-Face 💬
After a brief 10–15 min introduction, I was asked to describe the architecture for a simple website. For the next 30 or so minutes, we built up an architecture diagram, with the interviewers asking me more questions and presenting various challenges along the way.
Afterward, they talked through some of the challenges they have faced and asked how I would have approached them. During this stage, both Faesel and Adrià were engaging. We then discussed various different technologies being used at The Plum Guide, but they also shared some insight into what they planned to use in the future.
I must admit, I didn’t really have much energy before I came for the interview because I had spent most of the week dealing with production issues at my last workplace, but after the interview, I was fairly relaxed and pretty excited about what they do at The Plum Guide.
Cultural Interview 👪
The next stage was a cultural interview with Lara, the lead designer, and Lewis, one of the backend engineers. I believe one of the first things that Lara asked me was whether I wanted a toastie. I was taken aback by that question, but Lara explained that The Plum Guide has Toastie Thursdays.
The cultural interview felt much more informal and they wanted to know more about myself and what I was passionate about. They also shared their own interests, and it was great to hear how important culture is here at The Plum Guide.
After about 15 minutes, Imran, the CTO, stepped in for a chat to talk about the finer details and my career aspirations. As soon as Imran introduced himself, he said: “The other guys loved you”, and seemed very enthusiastic while talking to me. After a brief 10 minutes, I was on my way home feeling excited and rejuvenated. I already knew this is where I wanted to work.
The offer 📝
The next day I got a call from the recruiter, saying that they really liked me and wanted to make an offer. At this stage, I was 99% certain I would take the offer, but I wanted to see the other offers first as I knew I would hear from them shortly.
I was very open with Imran, and let him know that I would get back to him in a few days. However, he was very keen on me joining and told me to contact him if I had any questions. So I took him up on his offer and had a few phone calls with him to dig a little deeper into the tech. I was also invited to something called “Friday@5”, which is a company-wide meeting where all the departments present how the week went in a very transparent fashion. I really enjoyed this deeper insight and level of transparency you wouldn’t normally get in an interview or other companies in general.
To my surprise, I was invited to join the majority of the tech team who were heading to the pub for a few drinks. It gave me a chance to really get to know everyone in the team before deciding to accept the offer.
First Few Months 🌍
I started working at The Plum Guide a few months ago, and so far, I love it. I have always worked with legacy systems until now, so there is an overwhelming amount of tech that I need to learn, but my colleagues are always there to help me get on my feet whenever I need them. I could list what each of them has helped me with, but that would be a very long list 😂
I am also blown away by the amount of trust that the tech team has. There’s no top-down dictation of how we need to build something. If we want to use .NET Core 3.0, which recently came out, we can! Furthermore, the engineering teams here have almost complete freedom on how we tackle our OKRs, and that’s terrific.
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