The interview process with Inkling is pretty standard. I had an initial phone call with a technical recruiter which led to an hour technical code screening with the hiring manager and eventually on-site to meet with the team. The Inkling office is in a convenient location within the financial district (just several blocks away from the Montgomery Bart/Muni station). My on-site interview was scheduled for about 6 hours beginning from 9am - 3pm. I had 6 one-on-one interviews and had the opportunity to eat lunch with a couple people at the office. My first interview was a product demo, followed by 2 technical interviews where I peer-programmed on a computer, 2 behavioral/fitment interviews, and a systems design interview. Throughout this whole process, everyone that I spoke/interviewed with were extremely kind and easy-going. I appreciated that a lot because it takes away the pressure and nervousness that I would otherwise feel. I did not feel rushed by the interviewers to spit out answers and everything felt very collaborative (especially with the coding interviews). The only portion of the interview that felt off for me was during the Systems Design portion, because I felt like I couldn't understand the interviewers question too clearly. Aside from the interviews itself, I really enjoyed learning about the product over at Inkling. It seems like they are working with really exciting technologies and actually making things happen quickly to improve Inkling's future. Although this was by far the longest interview I've had, it was also one of the best interviews I've experienced so far.

Pair Programming. Had the recruiter uttered those words in the initial phone call, I would have responded with my own two words and we could have saved each other a lot of time. But the recruiter probably knew that, which is why she did not tell me anything about pair-programming until the onsite interview when they sprung it on me without any warning. The company suffers from stagnation due to inbreeding. They mostly hire interns as full-time, probably because management wants to micromanage and keep a tight control over what is done and the way it is done. Interns are probably happy to be working in an SF startup and probably enjoy being micromanaged. What they don't realize is that they are working with people who are not very experienced and will pick up a lot of bad habits. The fawning interns seem to have left the inexperienced "senior" engineers and their "leaders" with an inflated sense of self-worth. For example, the engineers, and their "leaders" lack a clear understanding of basic Complexity theory. So they don't have good CS fundamentals and want to build large-scale systems! If I were an investor, I would have experienced third-party architects audit their backend systems before investing more money in this company. Their "leaders" are immature, indecisive, and inexperienced and I have doubts about the scalability of their backend architecture. Their entire interviewing process was highly disorganized. They had trouble scheduling the interviews and some of their interviewers showed up late. This company does not have the chops to execute what it dreams of doing and will probably go out of business in the next few years. Avoid.