How to get a job @ Sqreen

Part three: the take home technical exercise

The series continues with technical exercises: where we use them and what do they look like

A Recap of the Series:

For those of you who have been following along, you will probably notice that it has been a little while since we last wrote about our interview process at Sqreen. I am happy to tell you that the wait is over — we will be completing the remaining parts of the series in the coming weeks. But before we do that, I want to allow our new readers to catch up so below are links to the first two articles in the series written by our amazing VP of People, Alison Eastaway.

The Talent Sqreen
The Expert Sqreen

A Polarising Topic?

Technical exercises — depending upon who you ask, you are going to attract a variety of thoughts and opinions and possibly spark a conversation or a disagreement.

Here at Sqreen, we use take home technical exercises in the interview process for many different roles (Product Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and even HR — I had 2 separate exercises to complete myself when I interviewed for my Talent Partner position).

For the purposes of this post, I will focus on where we use them and what they look generally look like in the Product Engineering interview process. If you are interested in the why and our philosophy on it, you should read this article by Alison.

Before we dive in, here is a little TL;DR on our principles for a take home technical exercises:

1. Time bound (can be completed in 2 hours). We want to respect everyone’s time commitments, personal life and constraints as best as we can.
2. Test topics that can’t be effectively tested in another format.
3. Test different things to the Expert Sqreen and Virtual Onsite — no needless repetition.

Where do we use technical exercises in our process?

Technical exercises are used as the 3rd step in our overall interview process. They fit in right between the Expert Sqreen and the Virtual Onsite Day (more to come on this in the next part of our series).

Some of you might be wondering: why wait this long to determine if a candidate has the technical skills required?

The answer, in our minds, is quite simple:

We want to ensure a candidate interviewing with Sqreen has the best interview experience possible. Having candidates take a technical exercise too early in the process diminishes our credibility when we say technical aptitude is not the number one criteria we look for when we hire Engineers. We also believe giving candidates more context on how our product and engineering works at Sqreen will help them during the technical exercise.

Our google drive of many, many exercises

What do Engineering technical exercises look like at Sqreen?

I want to share with you, the readers (and hopefully some candidates 😀), as much as I can on the technical exercises we use for Engineering candidates.

With this in mind, we want our candidates to present us with their best work for these exercises which is why we do not have a hard set time limit on when they need to return it to us — some candidates turn it around in 1 day while others need more time due to their schedules. Our rule of thumb is 5 days before checking in on them to see how it is going.

Full disclosure: we have gone through multiple iterations of our technical exercises over the past few years and we will probably go through more versions in the future.

We have two distinct Engineering groups at Sqreen that use technical exercises: our Agent team and our Product team.

Let’s start with the Agent team.

Given the complexity of agent technology, we decided that a generic one-size-fits-all test was probably not going to work so what we actually have a specific test for each of our agents. The fundamental goal of each exercise is the same:

To create an “agent” with only one feature: change request behavior and have the information “Protected by Sqreen” when the request leaves the application.

For the Product team, we have 2 exercises: one for Frontend Engineers and one for Backend Engineers. The exercises themselves are fairly straightforward — no tricks, no hidden tasks.

The goal of the Frontend exercise:

To develop a React application that displays all Pokemon (gotta catch em all!) and allows for filtering and search capabilities.

For the Backend exercise:

To create a simple web application that listens for webhook notifications from Sqreen. Candidates do need to download and install Sqreen (which they can do for free in a matter of minutes).

Disclaimer: while we use Python/Flask for our entire backend architecture today, we encourage all taking the backend exercise to write the exercise in whatever language/framework they are most comfortable with. 4 of the 5 dedicated Backend Engineers we have today did not use Python/Flask before joining us. In short, we love polyglots 😁.

Differentiating Factor: Technical Debrief

So what makes Sqreen different? What happens after a candidates submits their completed exercises: the technical debrief.

Every. Single. Candidate who completes a technical exercise, no matter the role and no matter how they performed, is given the option to meet with the engineer who graded their exercise for an in-depth look at why we graded it the way we did, what we focused on and any tips for the future.

This takes time and adds an extra step for our team but trust me when I tell you the ends justify the means. In a world full of generic rejection calls and templated emails, taking the time to add a human touch to an exercise is how we feel we stand out.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series, where we dive into our Virtual Onsite!