I have been contacted by a recruiter for a position at Viv labs. After some talk and another call with a hiring manager, I had to make a code challenge at home. It was a simple game to do with React. After that, I had an onsite with 4 rounds. The first was a demo of the product and a talk with the director of engineers and a product manager. The second was a technical review of my code. The third a system design interview and the latest an algorithm round. Every round was simple for who know their work. I also had a talk after that with 2 others peoples. The recruiter and I were really optimists and I was expected an offer a few days after, and even if they told to the recruiter that everything was good after each call with each referral, they decide to stop there for a behavior reason after they talk to my referrals. I was really surprised by this decision since I had a good feeling with everybody and I was thinking that they also liked me.

It was a busy week, and I had two other on-site interviews. The one at Viv Labs was the most technical, smoothly executed, and enjoyable. The on-site recruiter made the process more comfortable. He showed me around the office and introduced me to people at lunch. I happened to interview on a Wednesday, when they all have lunch together, so they invited me for that too. Lunch was friendly and I happened to meet a couple of people who would be interviewing me later. After lunch, there was still 15 minutes before interviews, and I observed two people playing Dance Dance Revolution on a PlayStation 2 in one of the conference rooms. They invited me to play, and since I used to play a lot, I went ahead (on a light difficulty level, as I didn’t want to be sweaty for my interviews). That was something that made me smile, I certainly didn’t get up in the morning thinking I was going to play DDR. The people that interviewed me were smart and knew what they were asking about. It was one of the most challenging front-end interviews I've had during this job search. They looked at my code (from the take-home coding question I describe below), and asked tough questions that required me to think hard about how to improve it. I learned new things about performance optimization in React, from things that they pointed out in my code, and I’m convinced that here I would be surrounded by people I could learn from. They were more interested in how I think and communicate, and how open I am to learning new things, rather than purely in what I might have been able to memorize about React. There were three technical interviews, and each was attended by 2 or 3 engineers, which simultaneously raised the bar for technical difficulty, and gave me a chance to meet more of the team. They worked together on the interviews in a way that made it clear they had planned ahead. The three technical interviews were different from each other, there was a design/architectural interview, a front-end technical interview, and an algorithm interview (administered by the back-end engineers). I also met with the manager of the team who talked about their work and demonstrated some of it. Overall I would rate the feel of this team as "quietly confident”, and found it to be comfortably familiar to me, like other startup companies that I’ve been fortunate enough to work at. I give them high marks for how well-prepared and well-executed the entire day was. When I left there, I wanted that job. About 5 days later, after all my weeks of job search effort and planning and timing finally paid off, I had 4 offers in hand, including one from Viv Labs. I chose to accept their offer because of the friendly and smart people, interesting project, competitive compensation, and convenient location.